A Photography Project
A small, hexagonal building in Long Beach got a programmatic makeover in about 1932, adding a metal and glass percolator on the roof, to become the Hot Cha Café. It was renamed Koffee Pot Café, but remained a coffee shop into the 1960s.
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The vintage 785-square-foot drive-through that once catered to Alta-Dena Dairy customers is, as of February 1, 2024, the latest caffeine hub in Tustin. The Googie-style store had been a noticeable staple in the city for over 70 years.
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The Santa Ysabel Asistencia was founded in 1818 as a “sub-mission” to Mission San Diego de Alcalá. It was to have been a link in a second, inland chain of missions in Alta California, a rest stop between San Diego and Sonora.
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On October 30, 1946, George Foster kicked off the California soft-serve ice cream craze when he opened Foster’s Old Fashion Freeze in Inglewood. The soft-serve ice cream was so popular that the chain had expanded to 360 locations by 1951.
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A lesser known, or perhaps lesser celebrated, example of a restaurant that was built during the heyday of Googie architecture in the Los Angeles area, Dinah’s Family Restaurant on Sepulveda Blvd. in Westchester opened in 1957.
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Could there be any better expression of SoCal’s car-centric culture than the programmatic architecture of the Fleetwood Center on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana? It was designed in 1986 by Lee Oakes based on a 1970s Cadillac Fleetwood.
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Architect William Pereira created the master plan for the UCI Campus at Urbanus Square, formerly the site of the Newport Harbor Buffalo Ranch. One of the barns, a Sears and Roebuck pre-cut building, was moved to the UCI campus in 1971.
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