Full transcript
Domingo
Domingo Ghirardelli was born in Rapallo, Italy in 1817. He learned the confectioner's trade in Genoa, sailed to Peru at twenty one, opened a chocolate shop in Lima, and lost it to the instability of South American politics. The gold rush brought him north, and he opened a store selling mustard, coffee, spices and chocolate to men who had come for something else entirely. The chocolate was what lasted. In 1893 he bought this whole block — the old Pioneer Woolen Mills on North Point — and turned it into the factory. The clock tower came later, in 1916, twenty-two years after he died, and it is usually described as a copy of the Château de Blois. Whoever chose it, the argument was the same: a chocolate factory should look like a castle.
The Square
In the early 1960s the Golden Grain Macaroni Company bought the firm and moved production out to San Leandro. A group of San Franciscans bought the empty block rather than watch it come down, and the square opened on the 29th of November, 1964 — the first major adaptive reuse project in the United States, and the model Boston copied for Faneuil Hall and Baltimore for Harborplace. The brick buildings, the clock tower, the underground chocolate storage tunnels, and the views over the bay were preserved. Today it is a shopping and dining plaza. The chocolate shop still operates on the ground floor. The free sample is available at the counter — a single square of milk chocolate. You do not have to buy anything.
The Ice Cream Move
Go to the ice cream counter, not the chocolate counter. Order a hot fudge sundae. The fudge is Ghirardelli's own, and they make it in a copper kettle in the shop. If the line is too long, the original shop at the Ferry Building is usually shorter.