The big illuminated sign above Aquatic Park has advertised chocolate for generations. The brick complex underneath it also has a place in American urban design history. Ghirardelli Square is considered the country's first major adaptive-reuse project, where an old industrial building was turned into shops, restaurants and public plazas instead of being torn down.

A chocolatier's long road to San Francisco

According to the square's history, Domenico "Domingo" Ghirardelli was born in 1817 in Rapallo, Italy, and apprenticed with a confectioner in Genoa. He moved to Uruguay at 20 and then to Peru, where he sold coffee and chocolate. His neighbor in Lima, James Lick, left for San Francisco in January 1848 with 600 pounds of Ghirardelli's chocolate. He arrived just before the Gold Rush. Ghirardelli followed a year later and opened a general store selling mustard, coffee, spices and chocolate.

The chocolate factory moved among four sites between 1852 and 1895. In 1893 Ghirardelli bought the whole block that had held the Pioneer Woolen Mills on North Point Street, and it became the company's headquarters.

Saved from the wrecking ball

In the early 1960s the chocolate company was bought by the Golden Grain Macaroni Company, which moved production to San Leandro and put the block up for sale. In 1962 San Franciscan William M. Roth and his mother, Lurline Matson Roth, bought it to keep it from being replaced by an apartment building. They hired landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and the firm Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons to turn the brick buildings into a retail and restaurant complex. It officially opened on Nov. 29, 1964.

Halprin's design was unusual for its time. He designed the street furniture and light fixtures, put the garage underground with shops at street level, and added a wheelchair ramp, a rarity then, for architect William Wurster. The square's owners say it later served as a model for Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace and Baltimore's Harborplace. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The mermaid fountain fight

In 1968 sculptor Ruth Asawa installed a bronze fountain called Andrea in the plaza. It shows two mermaids, one nursing a merbaby, surrounded by frogs and turtles. Halprin thought it wasn't serious and demanded it be removed. Many San Franciscans, especially women, rallied to Asawa's side, and the fountain stayed.

Today

The clock tower building now holds the square's main chocolate shop on its lower floors, and part of it became the Fairmont Heritage Place hotel in 2008. Atlanta-based Jamestown bought the square in 2013. The Powell-Hyde cable car ends a block away, and Aquatic Park and the Hyde Street Pier are across Beach Street.