Once the third-largest cannery in the United States, the ruins of the Bayside Canning Company are emblematic of the rise and fall of the town of Alviso, California.
Sai Yen Chew founded the Precita Canning Company in San Francisco in 1890, but after the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fires, he moved his business to Alviso, the bustling port at the southernmost tip of the San Francisco Bay. In a xenophobic time when Chinese laborers were shunned and discriminated against, Sai Yen Chew built lodging for hundreds of Chinese laborers, paid for additional laborers to be bused into his factory, and employed an almost exclusively Chinese workforce.
Thomas Foon Chew joined his father at Bayside Cannery at age 17 and proceeded to revolutionize the business. Among his many innovations were improved sanitation techniques, the introduction of ketchup to save spoiling tomatoes, and most notably, canning techniques for green asparagus. It was during Thomas Foon Chew’s tenure as the “Asparagus King” that Bayside Cannery became the third-largest cannery in the U.S. and Chew became the wealthiest Chinese American in the nation. When he passed away at the age of 42, Thomas Foon Chew’s funeral drew an estimated 25,000 mourners. In 1936, five years after Chew’s death and in the midst of the Great Depression, the Bayside Cannery closed for good.
In the middle of the 20th century, both the cannery and the town of Alviso fell into rapid decline. Due to the overuse of the aquifers under Alviso, the city progressively sunk into the ground, now resting several feet under sea level and protected by a series of levees. While the technologies developed at Bayside Cannery are still in use today, the buildings in Alviso were sold and repeatedly ravaged by flooding. In 1968, Alviso was annexed by the city of San Jose. Today, all that remains of the once-prominent cannery are sparse ruins adorned with a mural depicting Alviso’s past.
But while Alviso’s time as a city of industry is long over, this once-troubled neighborhood still has a bright future ahead of itself. Today, the ruins of the Bayside Cannery are part of the Alviso Marina County Park, which for thousands of hikers, birdwatchers, naturalists, and other outdoor enthusiasts is largely regarded as the gateway to the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Preserve. This area not only provides ample mixed use nature trails, but invaluable wildlife refuge for birds and other Bay Area wildlife.
