Verdugo Views: Billy’s Deli mural recalls a midcentury success story

When Jack Whitten opened Billy’s Deli on Wilson Street in 1949, it was a family operation — a successful one. They soon outgrew the space and moved to Orange Street in 1952.

“The business was so successful that it didn’t seem crazy to open a second location on Colorado Boulevard,” his son, Lee, wrote in a history of Billy’s that he recently sent to me.

Around the same time, his father was also approached to partner in the reopening of a landmark deli in Hollywood, near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He had worked there earlier, “as a lowly sandwich man, and the temptation to come in and save it as part owner was too great,” Lee Whitten wrote. “The partnership was troubled, and the venture failed.”

The Colorado Boulevard location also failed.

“The original Billy’s continued to chug right along. It had simply become an institution, and its success helped pay for the failed ventures,” he wrote. “I think it was not too long after this that my father had his first heart attack.’’

In the late 1960s, as his father recuperated from a second heart attack and his mother recovered from cancer surgery, it seemed time to reorganize. Lee Whitten took a leave from teaching art history and ceramics at L.A. City College to update the restaurant.

Custom tables were designed and meat and deli cases were custom-built to an older style no longer available.

“My dad had always picked up equipment at auctions, and he was getting nervous. I was not helping his heart condition,” Lee Whitten wrote.

The exterior had always been a problem; the building had been a furniture store with large window display areas facing west, so the sun poured in.

“No one would sit at the window tables. Blinds and awnings came and went,” he wrote.

Lee Whitten proposed a large wall to add a sense of height to a low-slung building. His parents agreed and he began creating the large ceramic mural that is still there today.

He had already been casting objects in plaster in his ceramic work; casting real food was an exciting new idea, but he needed models. Big models. So, he contacted the restaurant’s suppliers.

“These suppliers were friends; relationships went back decades, they cared about Molly and Jack and wanted to show it,” according to Lee Whitten. “The owner of Union Maid bakery, the biggest rye bread supplier in Los Angeles, proudly brought in a huge, beautiful braided challah bread and a giant rye bread. Crescent Cheese Co. found a giant provolone and had it shipped from Italy. Vienna Meat Co. sent a giant bologna, and so it went.’’

The foods were displayed in the deli before they were cast.

After the mural went up in 1970, Lee Whitten returned to teaching. In 1973, his father suffered a fatal heart attack and the family, “with a deep sense of gratitude to longtime employees and all those thousands who enjoyed Billy’s between 1949 and 1974,” decided to sell.

For the Whitten family, the mural remains a tribute to their parents’ memory. “We very much hope the mural can be preserved,” Lee Whitten wrote.

His sister-in-law, Sidney Higgins-Whitten, stated in a recent email, “This mural may be one of the only, if not the only, example of outdoor ‘70s art in Glendale.”

Another of Lee Whitten’s 1970s murals was recently relocated from its original home at the Manhattan Beach Library and has been preserved.

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The Days of the Verdugos Heritage Assn., whose members volunteer at the Catalina Verdugo Adobe, invite you to the annual Fiestacita on the grounds of the historic adobe at 2211 Bonita Drive from 4 to 7 p.m. on Sept. 27. Dine where California history was made and tour the adobe.

For more information, call (818) 352 4318.

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Readers Write: Arlene Vidor, who is active in the arts in Glendale, is working with the artist’s family and with Silverlake Conservation (a firm specializing in the conservation of sculptural pieces) to help find a new home for the mural. `

“The new owner of the building empathizes with the desire to retain the mural in some way; however, the property will be leased to a new tenant and it is not feasible for the mural to remain at the same location,” she wrote in a recent email. “The Whitten family is hoping that the city will step in to help save the mural or at least store it until a permanent home can be found.”

Vidor added that the deadline for action is less than a month away.

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KATHERINE YAMADA can be reached at katherineyamada@gmail.com or by mail at Verdugo Views, c/o News-Press, 202 W. First St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Please include your name, address and phone number.