Gas Is Turned Off on Grill and an Era : Blvd. Cafe on Old Route 66 in Duarte Serves Its Last Burger After 43 Years

Nobody kept a tally of how many hamburgers were fried on the Blvd. Cafe’s grill before they turned it off for good, but the number must be astronomical.

When Shirley Halburian’s family took over the little wood-slat orange juice and hamburger stand in Duarte in 1946, it fronted Route 66. The highway was “the mother road” back then, a humming 2,200-mile stretch of blacktop that connected heartland America to California. Just about anyone coming to Los Angeles had to pass the Blvd. Cafe, which got its name because the full “Boulevard” wouldn’t fit on the sign above it.

“All I heard when I was a kid was that everybody gets to California on Route 66,” said Halburian, 49, during an unfettered closing celebration at the cafe over the weekend, complete with a jukebox pumping out oldies-but-goodies and family members passing out free beer and food.

The Blvd. Cafe, seized through eminent domain by the city’s redevelopment agency, will be bulldozed next week to make way for a long-planned seven-acre shopping center. The Trammell Crow Development Co. project will be anchored by a supermarket, a city spokesman said.

It’s the end of an era, proclaimed a sign attached to a cafe wall.

“My father used to love the highway,” said Halburian, co-owner of the stand with her brother, Richard Tomasian. “On Sunday evenings, he’d stand out front and watch the endless ribbon of headlights coming back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas, Palm Springs, anywhere east.”

In those days, the Blvd., with its refrigerator full of fresh-squeezed orange juice, beckoned like an oasis to an endless stream of tourists, Okies, Las Vegas gamblers, con men, Santa Anita jockeys and movie stars.

When Susie and Tommy Tomasian (Halburian’s parents) and Susie’s brother, Jimmy Zoker, transplants from Connecticut, bought the stand 43 years ago, the highway that sliced through Duarte was lined with citrus orchards and avocado groves. Now, what remains of Route 66 in the San Gabriel Valley is a series of boulevards, most of them lined with franchise stores.

Most of the small businesses that served highway travelers have long since disappeared. The consensus among guests at the closing party on Saturday was that the Blvd. Cafe was “the last of the old hamburger stands.”

“I still don’t get it,” said Richard Tomasian, 60. “Nowadays, they’re tearing other places down so they can make them look like this.”

Behind him, in the enclosed part of the cafe, Tomasian’s wife, Doness, had just launched into a spirited jitterbug with one of the regulars. A crowd of more than 100 milled around a funeral wreath, propped in front of the building, with black-sprayed carnations and gladioli and a ribbon inscribed “Good-bye, Old Friend.”

“My father used to bring me here when I was 4 years old,” said Dennis Reichenfeld, a lanky man who works as a general contractor. “We’d always stop here to get a burger. It was his way of being with the baby. Same with me now. My wife works weekends and I bring my son here.”

Old Times Recalled

Though the founders of the Blvd. Cafe, Tommy and Susie Tomasian and “Uncle Jimmy” Zoker, are all gone now, they seemed a living presence at the closing party. The stories were flowing as fast as the beer.

For instance, it was recalled how Tommy, the principal chef, was the organizing force behind the operation, inspecting the meat, stamping out the hamburger patties by hand, keeping the customers happy. “He wouldn’t let us close on Christmas because he had to cook Christmas dinner for some of his older customers,” Shirley Halburian said.

As the party heated up, so did some of the customers, openly criticizing the Duarte City Council, which serves as the city’s redevelopment board. “If this is redevelopment, then I don’t believe in it,” said Dennis Schwarz, pointing out that one supermarket in town had already closed and another is scheduled to close next month. “So the brain trust at City Hall says, ‘Let’s build another one.’ ”

Requests for Market Told

Manuel Ontal, the city’s public information director, said that a major supermarket is the type of business most often requested by Duarte residents. Providing some material comfort to the owners, the city will pay them $1.1 million for the 1 1/4-acre property, which includes the family’s three-bedroom home on Sesmas Street.

But that was little solace to the celebrants. By sundown, they had consumed 25 cases of beer, 250 hamburgers and a bushel of cole slaw, all on the house. Dancers had spilled out behind the cafe. With the refrigerator empty, some were taking up a collection to get more beer.

All in all, a bittersweet occasion, Richard Tomasian said the next day. “There were a lot of tears at the end,” he said. “There were a lot of roughnecks, but they were crying, too. I guess a lot of people figured they’d never see each other again.”