120-year-old SLO building once provided power to entire city. Now a developer has new plans
An old stone building with a rusted tin roof sits at the corner of Pismo and Walker streets in downtown San Luis Obispo.
The Mission Revival-stylestructure at 280 Pismo St. has remained vacant for decades. It sits on an empty gravel lot, blocked off to the public by a chain-link fence.
Although the abandoned building is a familiar site for local residents and tourists, its identity is a mystery to most.
“I’ve just seen that building forever over there. I always wondered what it was,” San Luis Obispo resident Jeanne Eggert told The Tribune.
Her interestin the buildingpiqued after an autumnwalk with friends led to a search for any historic clues around the property. The group came up empty, she said.
So she reached out to The Tribune requesting an investigation into the structure at 280 Pismo St.
“I am thinking it’s some kind of historical building but there are no signs saying what it is or what the city plans to do with it. I would love to know what it is,” Eggert wrote in an email to The Tribune in November.
What was the building once used for? And how might the property be developed in the future?
Here’s what The Tribune discovered:
Stone building has intrigued SLO residents for years
The Pismo Street building is a local “oddity” that has historical relevance in downtown SLO, according to Thomas Kessler, the executive director of the History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
However, the stone structure is not a historic site and has no placard that explains its origin, he said.
The lack of information at the site has led to an outpouring of interest about the building over the years.
Kessler told The Tribune that questions about the structure are among the top five inquiries that the History Center receives.
“It’s a really attractive building on a big empty lot, just right off of the main drag,” he said. “It’s definitely within a zone that tourists would be walking around. Definitely, 100% of all the locals, all the neighbors, are aware of it.”
Downtown SLO structure was old gas works building
After a fire caused by a fuel production mishap burned San Luis Obispo’s first gas works buildings in 1879, the San Luis Obispo Gas and Electric Company decided to construct a new facility at 280 Pismo St., according to The Tribune’s archives.
The manufactured gas plant was built for prominent SLO merchant Louis Sinsheimer as a means to expand the city’s ability to provide gas and electricity to residents and businesses, according to a pamphlet from The Monday Club, a local preservation and community service organization.
“Sinsheimer wanted a building of substance to reassure his clientele that their more than 2,500 incandescent lamps, 73 arc lamps including 35 on the street and assorted other electrical needs would be well serviced,” The Tribune wrote in 1984.
The gas works facility opened its doors in 1905.
The building was constructed in the Mission Revival style to imitate the architecture of the state’s Spanish missions.
The wood-frame building, which measured 35 feet by 45 feet, was “clad with a rough-faced, yellow sandstone veneer, cut from the Caen Quarry in the Los Berros District between Arroyo Grande and Nipomo,” The Monday Club said.
The gas plant contained two gas storage tanks, a crude oil tank, a purifying plant and a generating building.
At the time, gas works employees used coal and oil to produce gas for residential cooking and lighting across the city.
Major blaze nearly destroyed SLO gas plant
In the early 1900s, the utilities industry was largely unregulated and work was dangerous.
Just two years after the Pismo Street plant was constructed, a blaze erupted on the morning of Oct. 14, 1907.
“FIERCE FLAMES CAUSE MUCH LOSS: SAN LUIS OBISPO IN DARKNESS — Fire Plays Havoc with San Luis Electric Plan,” one Daily Telegram headline read.
Gas works engineer Frank Park was seriously injured while attempting to put out the flames and power was lost across the city, which caused “a scurrying about to hunt up old lamps and put back into use gas meters,”The Tribune reported in 1907.
The Pismo Street site was nearly a total loss due to $10,000 in fire damage. After the fire, all that remained were the building’s stone walls.
However, the plant was fully insured, and was able to open again, The Tribune reported.
The plant eventually ended operations in 1915 once energy substations began receiving electricity through transmission lines, the Monday Club said.
Who owns old gas works building?
Over the decades, the old gas works building and the property on which it standshave changed ownership numerous times.
San Luis Gas and Electric Co. eventually sold the site to Midland Counties Public Service Corporation, a subsidiary of Pacific Gas and Electric Company in 1938.
PG&E sold the gas works site to W.O. Hall in 1959, who sold it to Davis Purlow.
“The subsequent owners, John and Carol King, had plans to turn the building into a bar, which never materialized, due in part to the fact that the building lacked a proper foundation,” the Monday Club said.
PG&E bought back the Pismo Street property in 2009 to conduct investigation and cleanup work, the company said.
“PG&E owns over an acre of land in and around the site,” the gas company said in a 2016 news release. “Cleanup of the site will provide long-term protection of public health and the environment and is an important step in future property development.”
The utilities company launched a 10-month project to clean up petroleum contamination and toxic metals including lead and arsenic at the site in July 2016, according to a Tribune article.
Workers removed an estimated 20,000 tons — 900 truckloads — of contaminated soil from the site along with four trees and two on-site buildings with lead-based paint and asbestos, PG&E said in a 2016 project update document.
The old gas works building remained on site while the cleanup project was underway, according to PG&E.
The gas and electric company wrapped up the cleanup in May 2017, completing its efforts “to restore the property to meet today’s federal, state, and local environmental standards,” PG&E communications representative Neil Hebert told The Tribune in an email.
In 2021, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control certified that the site had taken all appropriate actions to cleanup the property, according to PG&E.
PG&E sold the property to Alamo, LLC, in May 2024, according to the San Luis Obispo County Tax Assessor’s Office.
Alamo is managed by CoVelop, the SLO-based development company behind The Creamery and Duncan Alley, CoVelop owner Damien Mavis said.
“We bought it because we like the building so much, so we want to keep it up,” Mavis said.
What’s next for Pismo Street property?
Mavis said CoVelop hasn’t finalized plans for the old gas works building just yet, but hopes to turn it into a commercial property.
“Maybe food and beverage, something where the public can be in it,” he said.
Mavis said one idea is to use the one-acre lot to house a residential building, parking, and an outdoor area and then convert the stone gas works structure into a commercial hub.
So far, the city of San Luis Obispo has received applications for the new mixed-use development at 280 Pismo St., 1390 Walker St. and 251 Pacific St. that is “collectively referred to as the Gas Works project,” according to city public communications manager Whitney Szentesi.
The mixed-use development would contain a new 49-unit residential building.
The existing Gas Works building would be “rehabilitated with a proposed new addition,” along with some site improvements, including landscaping and parking, Szentesi said.
The development project was under environmental review as of Thursday, March 20, she said.
This story was originally published March 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
