A Loving Tribute to Roadside L.A.

While some Southern Californians spend big vacation bucks to escape local car culture, a convention of people like Pete Phillips of Texas is coming to the Los Angeles area this week to photograph our freeway ramps, embrace our drive-through dairies and worship our ‘60s Polynesian-motif motels.

“I never said we were a mainstream group. I realize we are a kind of fringe group, but we revel in that,” explained Phillips, an urban planner who is an official of the national Society for Commercial Archeology.

That organization does not scavenge ancient relics for profit, as its odd name might imply. Instead, members are devoted to finding and preserving mainly 20th century roadside buildings such as gasoline stations, fast-food eateries, drive-in cinemas and carwashes. Los Angeles, he stressed, “is probably the premier spot in the country for roadside or automobile-related architecture.”

How such an auto-dominated landscape came to be--and why it was copied nationwide--are the subjects of the four-day “Life in the Past Lane” conference, co-sponsored by the commercial archeology society, the Automobile Club of Southern California and the Los Angeles Conservancy. About 200 people, including many Midwesterners and Easterners, are expected to attend the meetings starting Wednesday night at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Like Southern California itself, the conference promises to mix both the serious and the wacky, the gorgeous and the tacky.

Which is which, however, depends on the eyes and ears of beholders who ride convention bus tours through the Westside, Burbank, the San Gabriel Valley and Anaheim’s Disneyland sphere. Their pilgrimage stops include the doughnut-shaped Donut Hole shop in La Puente, the giant archway of the Driftwood Dairy drive-through in El Monte, the Egyptian-Aztec flavored pyramid at the Covina Bowl center and the 1949 Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Burbank.

Panels of historians, architects, preservationists and critics will tackle such topics as “The Four Level Stack as Los Angeles Icon,” “The Stucco Box,” and “Booze, Bread, MGM, Ham and Giant Dogs: The Emerging Urban Landscape of Washington Boulevard, 1920-1940.” Other lectures will examine Southern California’s sprawl for its good and bad social effects.

“Of course, it’s hard to be too scholarly with some of the material because it’s also great fun,” conceded Diane Kane, a San Diego environmental planner who, along with Phillips, co-chairs the conference.

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Unlike the pedestrian-oriented sights of older Eastern cities or San Francisco, boisterous roadside landmarks were designed to grab a driver’s attention at 35 mph. But their charms may not be apparent to all Southern Californians, boosters acknowledge.

“You have to point out that which is already under their nose,” explained John English, who is leading a San Gabriel Valley and Anaheim tour for the convention. “They pass these places on the way to work every day, and they may not realize what’s here. They just need a little prodding, a little education.”

And that’s what English offered the other day during a private preview in his ’65 Rambler Classic 770. Car dealers, shoe repair shops, motels and a Sears catalog center took on new meaning with his enthusiastic explanations of their forms and history. How, he asked, can new and fake Spanish Mission-style strip malls compare with the very Deco and blue-tinted Royal Laundry in Pasadena? And, why would anyone prefer corporate hamburger joints to the Bahooka restaurant in Rosemead, a Polynesian Pop wonderland that has 98 fish tanks and tikis galore?

“Corporate America now has the idea that everyone wants the sameness,” English said, as he drove past indistinguishable shopping centers built in the 1980s. “They think people want to count on the predictability of the look and the feeling in the same way that people can get the same Big Mac anywhere.”

There is nothing predictable about the giant wooden arch of the Driftwood Dairy in El Monte, a convenience store that looks like it escaped from a world’s fair. Just driving under the arch and buying a drink there clearly thrilled English, despite his many previous visits.

“This is the ultimate California product,” he said, pointing out how the 1960 dairy is open to the elements except for its curved roof painted in blue, green, red, yellow and white. An image of Drifty the cow, the company logo, smiles down on passing motorists from a towering street-side sign.

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Further to the east, the red pyramid roof and volcanic rock facade of the Covina Bowl center appeared on San Bernardino Road. The 50-lane bowling facility was designed by Pat De Rosa in 1955 to evoke the Nile, Tahiti and the Yucatan--all at once. To commercial archeologists, its design freedom matches the social liberty the automobile provided. “That was the opportunity, the birthright almost, of Southern California,” English pronounced.

One conference session will feature stock film footage of Los Angeles roads and streets during the decades that commercial archeologists most love--from the 1920s to the ‘60s. Captured on celluloid is downtown crowded with elegant shoppers and Red Car trolleys in the ‘20s, the Hollywood Freeway’s Cahuenga Pass resembling a country road in the ‘40s, the Sunset Strip dotted with neon signs and barefoot hippies in the ‘60s.

“If you are interested in the relationship between the car and the built environment, sooner or later you will be looking at Los Angeles and Southern California because what happened here is a significant chapter in that story,” suggested Auto Club historian Matthew Roth, a conference speaker and organizer.

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The attention is deserved, Roth added, because “planning and building of a major metropolitan region is perhaps the most complex human enterprise there is.”

For conference information, call (213) 623-2489.