Swinerton Celebrates Building the West Since 1888

In 1952 Alfred Bingham Swinerton moved to Denver to manage the new Colorado office during construction of the Denver Coliseum and Safeway’s regional warehouse facilities.

Photo courtesy of Swinerton Builders

When Charles Lindgren boarded a train in Chicago in 1888 bound for Los Angeles, little did he realize that his soon-to-be-founded company would become one of the country’s largest and greenest general contractors 120 years later.

Lindgren worked in Los Angeles for only a short time before he relocated to Bakersfield to help rebuild the town after the devastating fire of 1889. Then, 11 years later, he teamed up with Berkeley engineer Lewis Hicks, a pioneer in steel-reinforced concrete construction. When the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 decimated San Francisco, the only buildings left standing were those built with steel-reinforced concrete. Thanks to their expertise, Lindgren and Hicks went to work rebuilding the city and just one year after the massive temblor, they celebrated the grand opening of the stately Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill.

Lindgren and Hicks parted ways soon thereafter, but Charles Lindgren went on to build several more San Francisco landmarks: the Olympic Club, the Palace of the Legion of Honor and the Exposition Auditorium (now known as the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium).

In 1908 Alfred Bingham Swinerton joined the company and in 1913 assumed the helm. For the next 50 years, Swinerton led the company through some of America’s most challenging and extraordinary times. With the invention of the high-speed elevator, Swinerton built San Francisco’s first modern skyscraper, the 26-story Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building.

Construction was under way on the Pacific Stock Exchange in 1929 when the crash hit, yet Swinerton completed the job. The company built Seals Stadium in 1931 and two years later completed the War Memorial Opera House. Then Swinerton won the contract to build the Santa Anita Race Track, allowing the company to open an office in Los Angeles, despite the hard economic times.

When defense production became a major source of business in the United States, Swinerton participated in defense construction, including the plutonium production facility at Rocky Flats near Denver, commissioned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1955.

Photo courtesy of Swinerton Builders

In 1936 the company landed the contracts to build a 312-mi pipeline for Shell Oil, the Barco pipeline across the Andes Mountains and the 1939-40 World’s Fair on Treasure Island. During World War II, Swinerton constructed portions of the Pan-American Highway in Central America, built Camp Pendleton in San Diego, a foundry for Columbia Steel and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Denver.

Riding the post-war boom, Swinerton built more than 70 major manufacturing, transportation and distribution facilities throughout the West, as well as in Central and South America.

In 1968 Swinerton journeyed to the South Pacific and constructed the Intercontinental Hotel in Papeete, Tahiti. The company then landed in Hawaii, building the Sheraton Maui, the Sheraton Waikiki, the Hyatt Regency and scores of other hotels, businesses and residential structures.

In 1970 the company constructed what can arguably be called the first green building, the Weyerhaeuser Headquarters in Federal Way, Wash., which features grass roofs, extensive daylighting and a manmade lake for heating and cooling.

The boom of the 1980s saw Swinerton become a leader in high-rise office construction, building more than two dozen showcase structures, including 101 California, 388 Market and 580 California in San Francisco and the Sanwa Bank Plaza, 1000 Wilshire and the Home Savings Tower in Los Angeles. 

Moving into the ‘90s, Swinerton built the 670,000-sq-ft San Francisco Centre, Levi’s Plaza and the Gap Headquarters, the Lockheed-Martin Launch Vehicle Assembly Building in Colorado, facilities for Sony Pictures and DreamWorks in Los Angeles, the Huntington Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena and the massive Pacific Bell Campus in San Ramon, which features green roofs and sophisticated manmade lakes that both cool and heat the buildings.

Entering the new century, Swinerton acquired a new headquarters building in San Francisco’s SOMA district near the Giants ballpark and renovated it green as an Existing Building Pilot Project in the USGBC LEED program. In 2002 the new Swinerton headquarters was certified LEED-gold. Today, green construction comprises one-third of the company’s annual $2 billion of work for such clients as Kaiser, Ritz-Carlton and Los Angeles World Airports.

Swinerton today is 100% employee owned, operating from 15 offices throughout the Western United States under the banners of Swinerton Builders, Swinerton Management & Consulting, HMH Builders, Lyda Swinerton Builders and William P. Young Construction.