Tiki! Tacky? 
The Googie style — popular in the the 1950s and '60s — is vanishing, bit by neon bit, from Orange County. 


The Orange County Register, June 27, 1998

On Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim, past blocks of rubble and razed buildings, there's a sign that reads, "You've just seen history in the making."

John English sighs. "More like history destroyed," he says.

Googie — the wild coffee-shop architecture of the 1950s and '60s — is being dismantled linoleum tile by terrazzo block in Orange County. Gone are the leatherette booths of the Inn at the Park's restaurant. Gone are the whales, the knights and the tiki masks of neon motel signs. Gone is the spinning Sputnik sign of the Satellite Shopland.

Gone, English says, is a city's personality.

"There's no whimsy anymore, no fun," the Los Angeles Conservancy member says. "Look at this!" he points to new hotel signs, lowered to ground level by an Anaheim mandate. "It's so ugly!"

Developers say the same thing about what was there before. Googie is kitsch. Worse, it's tacky. Scratch that. It's hideous.

"Look at the before and after pictures," says Mary McCloskey, deputy planning director for Anaheim. "Clearly the signs are far more readable now. It's not cluttered. It's much more attractive."

As for the historic value of the area, McCloskey says, "We don't think architecturally that there is anything significant."

The battle over Googie — whether it's important or atrocious — has been waged since 1949, when architect John Lautner designed a Los Angeles coffee shop by that name.

"It could have just as easily have been 'Denny's style' or 'Norm's,' " English says. "Googie just stuck, partly because it was so outrageous."

The building was as outrageous as its name. Beams of black, teal and orange jutted from the roof, glass windows stretched from floor to ceiling. Inside, customers dined at a curved tile counter under bulbous chandeliers. The marquee blinded passers-by with bright neon and whiplash lettering.

Googie's and others set off an explosion of roadside architecture — coffee shops, motels and bowling alleys intended to seduce the cars and teen-agers of a booming California. The style was loose, but distinctly proletarian. It didn't force neo-classic columns upon a bubble-gum-chewing America. It played with the senses like a catchy pop song or an Annette Funicello movie.

What is Googie? It's flying saucer signs and Polynesian hut buildings. It's a pool in the shape of an Apollo capsule, a lobby in the shape of an A-frame, a giant spinning bowling pin. It's goofy, vivid, larger than life. Hard to define; impossible to forget.

Alan Hess, author of "Googie, Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture," says that if the streamlined design of the 1930s was based on ocean liners, then Googie was rocket ships. Post-war technology allowed builders to move beyond convention. Freeways reached into the heavens on giant concrete pedestals, steel frames supported butterfly roofs over cavernous eating areas. Plastics meant no shape was beyond design.

Walls didn't need to hold up the roof — they could be made of glass. It became as important to see in the building as it was to see the building; fluorescent lights made sure of that.

Architects hated Googie. Or at least the architects writing for critical journals, who wrote mocking dismissals in national magazines — and inadvertently helped spread the style in the process.

Motel and drive-through owners, though, loved it. Especially the ones around Disneyland. Eager to attract tourists — and play off Disney's Tomorrowland style — they built bigger and bolder, wilder and wackier. 

One pioneer was Al Stovall, who built a string of hotels with a futuristic theme: the Galaxy, Cosmic Age, Space Age Lodge and Inn of Tomorrow. Today the Inn of Tomorrow is a Best Western, with only a few pyramid mirrors in the lobby to remind visitors of the fluorescent swoops that once stood there.

"Googie architects took modernism and made it human," Hess says. "It's very American. It's very Californian."

John English grew up in the Bay area, an art teacher's son taught to appreciate sculpture and drive-in movie theaters. Growing up, he drifted between video production and writing, but found himself drawn "to the Jetsons and Flintstones stuff of our collective unconscious."

He started cataloging Southern California architecture, got involved in the Los Angeles Conservancy. He thinks about writing a book or opening a museum. But mostly he gives tours of dwindling Googie.

"This stuff was interesting, it was bold," he says. "People today are so afraid of extremes — of being associated with bad taste."

English wears a dark green, thrift-store, wool-blend suit with a light green shirt and black suede shoes. He talks with his hands. His wears his hair in a floppy part; at 35, his temples have flecks of gray. The whole ensemble — vintage suit, passionate personality — recalls Crispin Glover, the father from "Back to the Future."

"Kitsch," English says, means excessive ornamentation. Googie isn't that. Nor is it tacky, or even ugly. But he doesn't argue that all Googie is inherently worthwhile, either. "I'm just saying, look at the buildings from various periods as examples. This is just as valid as anything else."

In the 1950s, he notes, Anaheim and other cities demolished much of the Victorian architecture that preservation groups are now trying to save. Twenty years from now, will we miss what was destroyed in the '90s?

Pointing to a new supermarket next to a Googie Baskin-Robbins, English says, "Everything today is just-add-water Mission revival." Strip malls are bland clones of Mediterranean or Spanish design. Part of English's job is cultural anthropology, peeling back the layers of remodeled buildings. They usually go from yellow to green "and now beige."

In Los Angeles, the conservancy and others are fighting to protect some old Ship's restaurants and other Googie icons. Cities such as Westwood are pressuring developers to build retro-style buildings — recently, In-N-Out Burger opened a Googie drive-through there.

Anaheim has no such advocates. The Anaheim Historic Preservation Foundation, which fought eight years to protect homes from the early 1900s, is purely residential. "Though I would have to say (Googie) is totally awesome," says Sally Horton, a member of the foundation. Fighting for it "is the cutting edge of historical preservation."

But Hess doesn't think it's that out there. Commercial architecture, he says, reflects a city's history as much, if not more, than its homes.

"They tell us about an important era of our history — what people did, how they worked and so forth," he says. "Anaheim doesn't realize what an asset it has. It's wiping out a remarkable treasure."

The decision to renovate the Disneyland area is an economic one. The Pitcairn Motel on Harbor Boulevard, for instance, was bought by the city of Garden Grove because "it was a problem," says David Belmer, project manager for the Agency for Community Development.

Pitcairn manager Jimmy Reno is more specific. "There's a lot of dope here," he says.

Facing poverty, drug dealing and crime, it's easier to raze then renovate. After Garden Grove bulldozes the Pitcairn today, a multimillion-dollar hotel will be built in its place. The outrageous tiki god sign out front will be given away — or chopped into pieces.

"We did a study of historically significant structures," Belmer says. "There wasn't anything built in the '50s or '60s that qualified."

Anaheim decided in 1995 to revitalize the run-down hotels and shops along Katella Avenue with a $186 million investment in cookie-cutter teals and browns. 

"They associate Googie with the economic problems — so they get rid of it," English says. It also gives room to build highrises, since most Googie were of an era of one-story, big-land mentality.

The irony, activists note, is that nostalgia is hip, daddy-o. Swing clubs are packed. "Swingers" was an indie movie hit. Cartoonist Eric Stefani, who founded the multiplatinum band No Doubt, designed the group's logo from the letters on the Pitcairn sign.

Even Disneyland reached back in time for its redesigned Tomorrowland.

"They looked back to what the vision of the future might have been," says Dave Smith, archives director for the Walt Disney Co. "That's safer. When you try to predict tomorrow, tomorrow catches up with you."

But sooner or later, what was modern, then cheesy, is suddenly vintage.

Keeping Googie alive could work in Anaheim's favor, Hess says. "How will they compete against Las Vegas or Orlando? Here is an aesthetic that's joyful, exuberant, unique."

Anaheim is unswayed. Before the redevelopment, one consultant suggested the city collect old Googie signs and display them on street medians, or even a garden. The proposal was quickly dismissed. 

"We did a historical inventory of the signs," the Planning Department's McCloskey says. "But in a practical sense, they're aging, and don't fit. I think people will enjoy the new look much better."

Orange County identifies no piece of Googie as worthy of historical preservation. Some places, such as the Parasol Restaurant in Seal Beach or the Linbrook Bowl in Anaheim, remain unthreatened, but how long, English wonders, before developers move into those areas too?

"If cities really believe that cheap Mission architecture is what people want," he says with a shrug, "then that's what they're going to get."