San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Coca-Cola, HemisFair shared Lafitte Street
I enjoyed reading your (June 17) article about Lafitte Street. I worked at the San Antonio CocaCola Bottling Co. downtown for a couple of years before the company moved to its present location on Exposition Drive (now Coca-Cola Place). Lafitte was a short street, and the bottling plant and offices, with parking for all the trucks and employees, seemed to take up most of that street. I seem to recall that the address of the company was 123 Lafitte St. I started working there in the summer of 1964 and moved with the company to Exposition Drive, but can’t remember the year we moved. I think we were still downtown during HemisFair, because of the buzz and excitement about the fair, but could be wrong about that. Coca-Cola had a pavilion at the fair.
I was a college student, and my job as a secretary was a summer job which morphed into a full-time job while I took evening classes at St. Mary's University. When we moved to the new plant, we went to computer processing, and I became the company programmer. We didn’t have a computer; I would drive downtown with my boxes of punch cards and process them at NBC Bank on their huge computer. I worked at Coca-Cola until the fall of 1969. Thanks for the drive down Memory Lane!
Sarah Benson
Lafitte Street, only three blocks long, was one of many street names and many more business buildings and houses that fell to urban renewal during preparations for HemisFair ’68, the World’s Fair held in San Antonio from April to October 1968.
The San Antonio Coca-Cola Bottling Co., established here in 1903, had moved to the neighborhood off South Alamo Street during the early 1920s. For the rest of that decade, the factory was advertised at 418-420-422 E. Commerce St., and Coke’s “Sales Room” was at 121-123 Lafitte. Proving that the fizzy favorite was Depression-proof, the bottler consolidated its operations in 1931 with the completion of a new, two-story addition. The “modern new plant” at 123 Lafitte was “equipped with the latest bottling equipment,” reported the San Antonio Light, June 20, 1931.
The move that you remember came a few years before the fair, as property was being bought up on all sides of the bottling plant. Lafitte Street, as noted here in the June 17 column about a rental property there, felt the squeeze of two giant construction projects — Interstate 37 and HemisFair ’68. Coca-Cola escaped the inevitable by leaving the old neighborhood before others could or would.
Executives and civic worthies worked up a thirst at a groundbreaking ceremony June 30, 1964, at the site of Coke’s new business premises on Exposi- tion Drive, just south of the Freeman Coliseum. Despite “glaring sun, humidity and dust,” according to the San Antonio Express, July 1, 1964, they turned symbolic shovels of dirt at the new site “and retired to the cafeteria of the StrausFrank Co. building” on the near East Side. Designed by Ayres & Ayres and completed in 1954 as a linchpin of a then-new business and industrial park, the merchants’ former property was about to become the center of a new Coca-Cola complex, to reach 210,000 square feet with new buildings on the 16-acre campus.
The bottling company moved from Lafitte Street in “easy stages,” reported the Express, May 23, 1965. For more than a year, the site underwent renovations, paving and landscaping to ready the former showroom and warehouse buildings for executive offices, manufacturing, shipping and transportation to serve a large regional distribution center. The executive offices had just moved to the second floor of the new plant almost a year after the groundbreaking.
In a sense, Coca-Cola was still downtown during the 1968 fair. Although there had been some discussion of preserving the Lafitte Street plant as a warehouse for the fair, it didn’t make the cut.
During the summer of 1965, however, Coca-Cola as a national brand committed to building a pavilion — a dedicated space for a brand, nation or organization to present itself to fairgoers.
Both Coke and its traditional rival, Pepsi, “had pavilions that were approximately 17,500 square feet…considerably larger than most governments (represented at the fair),” said John Carranza in “Eating Modernity: The Culture of Consumption and the Consumption of Culture at HemisFair ’68,” published in the University of the Incarnate Word’s online Journal of the Life and Culture of San Antonio.
The cola companies’ pavilions “tied for third place in sheer size,” but Coke had a secret ingredient in its favor.
Long lines soon formed outside the round Coca-Cola building, not just for small samples of the product but for a free, family-friendly show.
This was “Kaleidoscope,” Sid and Marty Krofft’s life-size puppet production of an original fairy tale, starring a character that would evolve into the eponymous star of the brothers’ trippy “H.R. Pufnstuf ” Saturday-morning TV show, broadcast from 1969 to 1972 by NBC.
Twelve times a day, an eightperson crew played puppets representing a handsome prince turned into a dragonlike monster, talking flowers and mushrooms, a witch and somehow, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Liberace and Lawrence Welk. When the witch flew out over the audience, reported the Light, May 22, 1968, “Children screamed, and adults were enthralled.” The show drew 6,000 visitors a day, though some may have been coming back for an encore.