Now and Then: The Hygenic Dog Food Building
For once, this isn’t a story about a disappearing or radically-changed building over the years — the building pictured here doesn’t seem to have changed externally at all over the more than twenty-five years I’ve been photographing it. But the neighbourhood? That’s a different story….
Back in the 1990’s I used to say if you don’t know where the Hygenic [sic] Dog Food building is, you just don’t know Berkeley. I still say that, but I’d guess more people know about it now, simply because of the rapidly-gentrifying area around it.
The building nowadays? Amazingly, apart from some noticeable fading, the exterior’s pretty much unchanged after twenty-five+ years. I didn’t see the old “Health Food For Dogs” sign painted on the side the last time I drove past, but maybe I’m not trying. What has changed, though, and it’s diagnostic of the whole West Berkeley / Emeryville gentrification process, is that it’s now surrounded by hipster workshops, food places, and — god help me! — there’s even a pedestrian and bike path next to it (I used to ride through this area to and from work every day in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when it was almost entirely commercial and industrial and would have killed for a bike path to keep me off the busy truck-clogged streets back then).
I used to wish I had the money to buy the building — I always had vague plans to turn it into a bookstore and / or coffee shop called (of course!) The Hygenic Dog Food Factory, but I obviously never had the guts (or the money) to do that. I have no idea what’s in store for the building nowadays, but I’ve basically stopped telling everyone it’ll soon be swept away by the flood of gentrification going on around it….
