The Prime of Los Angeles
The city of the future discovers its past and gains a new appreciation for culture

By Les Daly
The Atlantic, May, 1994, Vol. 273 ; No. 5 ; Pg. 58

(Brief Excerpt)

...As serious as Los Angeles is becoming about its place in history and the history in this place, it still finds time for the quirky. One night last year some 250 people materialized out of the dark streets at the deserted edge of downtown for a conference sponsored by the busy L.A. Conservancy. They were there to pay homage to those swooping, leaping, eye-catching coffee shops of tall roofs and taller signs, the glass and stainless-steel and red-leatherette kind of coffee shops that sprang out of Los Angeles in the 1950s and landed and multiplied like pointy bugs all over the country and, indeed, over much of the world. "Those coffee shops are part of the social history of the people living here," the architect and writer Alan Hess has proclaimed. He is an authority on a design style that has come to be called Googie, after an architecturally innovative coffee shop that inspired a chain, now departed.

As the crowd pored over drawings, photographs, and sketches of coffee shops that still pin down a number of intersections throughout the city, a slender blond-haired man watched, bemused. "I'm surprised so many people are here," said Eldon Davis, whose firm designed a number of the shops, "even if it's free. I never thought these buildings were built to last or to be preserved. Anyway, if they want to preserve them, there's always film. I guess other people think differently."