Restaurant Owner to Fight Historical Landmark Efforts

The owner of a Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank that preservationists want enshrined as a state historical landmark is finding the proposed honor hard to swallow.

In fact, Philip MacDonald said he plans to vigorously oppose efforts by a Los Angeles Conservancy task force to nominate the 43-year-old building as an official “California Point of Historical Interest.”

“I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but preserving this coffee shop is insipid,” MacDonald said Wednesday from his Newport Beach offices. “It’s preserving banality. That building is dull and trite and needs to be scrapped.”

MacDonald said he was further outraged because he only learned of the preservationists’ goal after the Los Angeles County Historical Landmarks and Records Commission had already voted March 9 to recommend the building for historic status.

“We learned about this through the media,” he said. “I got back from a skiing trip, and my fax machine was buzzing with newspaper articles. In the real estate business, this is tantamount to the taking of property.”

County officials said a notice informing MacDonald of the hearing was sent to an old address. Prompted by MacDonald’s protests, the commission will reconsider the recommendation at a hearing in early April that is yet to be scheduled, officials said.

The restaurant was brought to the attention of the commission by the Los Angeles Conservancy’s 1950s Task Force, which regards the building as a prime example of an “early coffee shop design” style that originated in Los Angeles.

If the commission stands by its recommendation at the April hearing and the Board of Supervisors agrees, the nomination will be forwarded to the state Office of Historic Preservation, which will make the final decision. Such a designation would make the restaurant only one of 53 official points of historical interest in the county.

MacDonald said he and his family, who have owned the building and property for 43 years, said they have long planned to tear the restaurant down and erect a three-story office building. He said he has been in negotiations with Bob’s Big Boy executives about buying out their lease.

Peter Moruzzi, a member of the conservancy task force, said he had no idea that MacDonald planned to tear down the building when he made the nomination to the county commission. He said the restaurant was on a list of several buildings that the group wanted to preserve.

“We had heard rumblings that Bob’s was thinking of selling the restaurant and that it might become a Coco’s or something else,” he said. “We thought the sign would be taken down and the building would be painted green. We didn’t want that.”

“If we had known about his plans, we would have acted sooner. Now that we do know, it’s even more reason for us to push for this,” Moruzzi added.

The conflict might trigger another tug of war similar to that staged by a group of Studio City homeowners who unsuccessfully fought to prevent a developer from tearing down a carwash it wanted to have designated as a cultural monument.