H and H Coffee Factory South Face at Sunset, 14 March 2021
A tight oblique view of the 1932 Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. factory’s south face at 8:16 PM on 14 March 2021 — right at sunset for San Antonio that date, photographed from the south looking north. The cream-stucco wall recedes to the right of the frame in warm ambient shadow; the familiar terracotta pantile parapet coping steps across the top edge exactly as it does along the top of the south end wall in the 22 February 2019 shot from the rail siding.
Worth noting, because it’s the reason this frame reads so differently from the 2019 one: these two photos document the same face of the building at dusk, but on 14 March 2021 we were six days out from the spring equinox, and near the equinoxes the sun sets close to due west. The south face is therefore edge-on to the setting sun rather than catching it, and it reads in ambient shadow. In the 22 February 2019 frame the late-winter sun was still setting south of due west, so direct sunset light fell on the same south face and lit up the stucco, the pantile coping, and the corner finials in pink. Same wall, a few weeks of the year apart, and the sun’s azimuth does all the work.
What this particular equinox-eve light makes unusually legible is the building’s current exterior security treatment: each of the second-floor multi-pane steel-sash industrial windows and the smaller first-floor openings is fully caged behind a bolted-on diamond-mesh steel security grille, and through those grilles a steady warm yellow interior light glows from inside the plant — interior lights on at dusk seen through the cage, which is the detail that gives the frame its particular mood. A vertical downspout runs down the wall between the upstairs and downstairs window bays.
To the left of the wall the western sunset sky fills the open side of the frame — a dramatic pink, coral, and orange dusk with wispy cirrus streaks — and a small silhouette element (a post or vent cap) sits just above the horizon at the bottom centre.
This is a companion piece to the 22 February 2019 dusk view from the tracks (wide ground-level exterior of the same south face in the late-winter sunset) and to the 4th-of-July roof-top dusk view (rooftop vantage, different season) — three different dusk registers of the same building.
