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Peeling away history at Pearl Brewery
It's beginning to look a lot like the good old days at the Pearl Brewery.
They just aren't the same days that many San Antonio residents will remember.
As workers remove the cream-colored paint that covered the brick, limestone, clay tile and tin on nearly every building surface, they're unveiling a pre-1950s brewery.
Yellowish brick, red mortar and red clay tile are showing through. The galvanized tin dome roof on the distinctive 1894 brewhouse, built in the Second Empire style popular during the era, is now the original black instead of the gold that appeared midcentury.
“I think people remember the gold dome and the white paint,” said Jeffrey Fetzer, senior associate with Ford Powell & Carson Architects. “We don't know why they painted everything white.”
Fetzer heard an old story about a local paint company coming up with a custom color called “Pearl beige,” which then got slapped onto every building in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, the paint had been trapping moisture in the bricks and causing damage for decades.
Mason Curtis Hunt III said repairing the buildings requires several rounds of paint stripping and washing, followed by an even more tedious process — hand chiseling out the decaying mortar and replacing it with a new mixture. Sometimes, eroded bricks must be turned around or replaced.
“You have to have patience,” Hunt said.
It also takes detective work.
The brick at Pearl Brewery came from Calaveras, near Elmendorf. The brick business is no more, but remnants of its work are still visible in the area, so Hunt and his wife drive around on the weekends looking for pieces to use at the brewery.
Recently, they discovered an old chicken coop and paid the owner so they could take the building apart, brick by brick.
“We hit the roads on the weekends, and we never drive home the same way,” Hunt said.
Meanwhile, Fetzer has been studying historic photos and looking at paint samples under a jeweler's loupe. After he took paint scrapings of the brewhouse roof, it turned out that gold wasn't the original color of the dome. Black was.
“We've been trying to be faithful to what we've found in the buildings,” Fetzer said. “We do a lot of investigation and history beforehand, but once the craftsmen get involved, you always find something unique.”
The restoration has teamed Fetzer, the project architect for the restoration of the State Capitol building, whose firm also has worked on everything from the historic missions to Galveston's historic Strand District; and Hunt, a fourth-generation mason whose family has worked on the Alamo and built the old San Antonio Library, later the Hertzberg Circus Museum. (Now the Hertzberg building is being turned into the Dolph and Janey Briscoe Western Art Museum; and Hunt's company, Curtis Hunt Restorations, is doing the exterior restoration work, while Ford Powell & Carson is overseeing exterior renovation).
The Pearl Brewery operated from 1883 until 2001. Silver Ventures bought the 22-acre site in 2002 and has been turning it into a mixed-use development with restaurants, residential units, retail and offices.
The exterior renovation of the brewhouse is nearing completion. For the repair of its distinctive tin roof, Silver Ventures turned to American Roofing and Metal Co. The company was founded in 1904 and has worked on the State Capitol, the Tower Life building, the Bexar County Courthouse and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower.
The company repaired and replaced rusted tin in some places, a process that required special metal fabrication to match the building's ornate design, Fetzer said.
And work on the top half of the clay tile smokestack has revealed the white tile lettering that reads “Pearl” on two sides and “Pride” on the part of the stack facing the San Antonio River, a reference to the Texas Pride beer once brewed there.
That original lettering, like the black tin dome, now has returned to its full old glory.