https://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent/2012/04/10/what-happened-to-the-hamms-brewery-sign/

Turn off the sound.

Commentary by the video poster.

VATS GO BYE, BYE

Documents the Demolition of San Francisco’s Hamm’s Brewery, AKA “The Vats”, home to the San Francisco Punk Scene and Punk Bands at 145 Florida St. in the Mission-South of Market district in 1984,

The Hamm’s Brewery had been closed and abandoned since 1975. In 1981 the brewery’s beer storage vats, over sixty 40 foot by 10 foot steel tanks, became ideal and affordable homes and studios to play music.
Probably the most famous band to occupy The Vats was an Austin, Texas band called Millions of Dead Cops.

Doorways were jack hammered open and by 1983 the brewery had become a well established squat referred to as “The Vats”, rent was cheap, $100-$200 a month, without rules or regulations, it soon became a crash pad and rehearsal studios for out of town punk residents and musicians who became known as “Vat Rats”.

By 1984 San Francisco’s office of Housing and Economic Redevelopment in conjunction with the owners of the property engaged in a million dollar renovation of the building, the Vat Rats were evicted and the vats they occupied were torn down to make way for a parking lot for future residents.

I happened to drive by the building on the day the demolition crew began to pound the building with heavy steel wrecking balls and multiple cranes. The work was slow going; one of the cranes broke from the effects of severe metal fatigue. Progress was painfully slow but I was able to witness and film the collapse of an entire wall after about a week of numbing demolition work and day –long repeated solid wrecking ball blows to the structure!
 

Last edited by Admin (1/18/2020 12:34 pm)

https://brookstonbeerbulletin.com/hamms-in-san-francisco/