When Van de Kamp's outgrew its downtown plant, it built new headquarters in Glassell Park. The organization and it is competitors -- including Frisco Baking Co. Dolly Madison, Foix French Baking and 4-S Loaves of bread -- employed a large number of workers, making bakeries among the greatest industries around the city's northeast side.
Your building would be a prime illustration of an organization conveying its image through architecture. Created by architect J. Edwin Hopkins, it sported a red tile roof, three Flemish gables and brick arches within the Nederlander Renaissance Revival style. Its primary entrance incorporated beveled-glass doorways with images of windmills along a rustic road.
In June 1931, delivery trucks using the trademark windmill emblem started moving from the loaves of bread. Nowhere-and-white-colored boxes inside were full of chocolate and powdered-sugar doughnuts, soft macaroons, lemon meringue pies, spongy jellyrolls and heavenly angel food and milk-chocolate cakes.
Within the 1930s and '40s, Van de Kamp and Frank family entrepreneurs blazed the best way to a brand new industry: convenience foods. They shifted for free-standing bakeries to coffee houses and bakeries within supermarkets.
In the peak, Richard Frank stated, there have been 320 bakeries and outlets and three coffee houses, as well as the drive-in alongside headquarters, which opened up in 1939. Carhops were outfitted as Nederlander boys and women.
The recipe for sweet success labored until 1956, when Theodore Van de Kamp died at 65. That year, illness and injuries from the near-fatal vehicle accident caused Lawrence Frank to retire.
With founders from the picture, the families offered their curiosity about the organization.
Within the next 30 years, Van de Kamp's altered possession several occasions but stored its name. However in 1990, the organization went belly up, completed in by archaic equipment and labor costs.
2 yrs later, the commercial plant was named a historic-cultural monument. The dilapidated hulk sitting vacant for fifteen years, its walls engrossed in graffiti rather of flour. Then, recently, basically two small structures and also the facade were bulldozed.
The facade will end up the doorway towards the City College Northeast Campus, slated to spread out in 2007.
Saving the facade, Richard Frank stated, is "sentimentally nice" maintaining your building wouldn't make sense. "It wasn't structurally seem and may 't be employed for any practical purpose."
One of the familiar windmills survives. Now stationary and eco-friendly instead of blue, it adorns a Denny's in Arcadia.
