There can be an uneasy beauty in scenes of decay and crumbling structures. Places once teaming with life now abandoned and weathered by decades of sun, wind, rain, and neglect. Places we often pass by and ignore as they’ve become a fixture along our route to somewhere else.

For me, that place was the former Bayside Canning Company in Alviso. I’ve driven by the abandoned factory many times, seeing it without really seeing it. Then, last weekend, just before sunset, on a whim I stopped to take a closer look.

What I found that day was a major case of the blues for this dilapidated wooden structure. A faded mural dominated by 50 shades of blue covered the entire front façade. A fence with a BEWARE OF DOG sign kept me from getting a closer look at the sagging roof and doors on the ice-blue north side of the building. I suspect there was no dog but didn’t want to find out the hard way.

In the photo below, large, loading dock doors are camouflaged with a mural scene depicting railroad tracks over marshland.

The collage below shows a closer look at a sample of the washed-out mural scenes.

A break from the blues with a pop of red from this small section of the mural!

About the Bayside Canning Company:

The cannery first opened in San Francisco in 1890 as the Precita Canning Company, was destroyed by fire in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and subsequently reopened in Alviso in 1906 as the Bayside Canning Company before closing its doors in 1936. In the early 1900s, the cannery was the third largest in the world – next to Del Monte and Libby. The mural, painted in 1981, depicts the history of Alviso.

Inspiration: Weathered and Thursday Doors.