Birthplace of the 501
Following the California Gold Rush, which began in January 1848, San Francisco turned minerals into machines. The city filled up with enterprises that included mills, shipyards, cattle yards, an explosives factory—and a dry-goods company that made bedding, purses, handkerchiefs, and clothing. That company was started by an oval-faced, never-married Bavarian named Levi Strauss.
Among Levi Strauss & Co.’s wholesale customers, there was a Russian immigrant and itinerant tailor named Jacob Davis. In the 1870s, Davis lived in Reno and one day a woman walked into his shop wanting work pants for her husband, a woodcutter. Davis responded with trousers made of “duck” cloth and heavy-duty cotton denim. The design included copper rivets for reinforcement, and a signature orange-threaded pattern stitched into the back pocket. These so-called “blue jeans” were instantly popular. Strauss helped Davis secure a patent in 1873 and devoted a factory to their production. The company was incorporated in 1890, and “waist overalls” were given the lot number 501.
Info
Address 250 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103 | Public Transport Bus: 22 (16th St & Valencia St stop); 49 (Mission St & 14th St stop) | Hours Not open to the public, viewable from the street only| Tip The Levi Strauss Visitor Center is located at 1155 Battery Street and is open daily from 10am to 5pm; admission is free.
Strauss died in 1902, and in 1906, the earthquake destroyed the company’s headquarters and factories. But the business was quickly rebuilt at 250 Valencia Street—then a thoroughfare in a sleepy commercial district, now San Francisco’s version of Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, California.
The three-story timber-framed yellow building was the last Levi factory in this country, and closed in 2002. The building is now a Quaker elementary school. The floors of the original building remain, along with all the signs of wear. The reception desk is a Levi’s prototype “retail desk.” Note the large playground in front, which serves much the same purpose today as it always did, as a recreational area for children—once the children of company workers, now the children of families drawn to work in the “city in the cloud.”
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