Googie Architecture

Googie architecture: A May 18 Travel section article on Googie architecture listed the wrong address and telephone number for the Starbucks at the former site of Ships Culver City. The correct information is 10705 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232; (310) 202-8984.

Googie architecture: A May 18 Travel article on Googie architecture listed the wrong hours for the Starbucks at the former site of Ships Culver City. It is open 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays and 4:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

The only person more intimately acquainted with the nuances of Googie design than architect Eldon Davis might have been comic Lenny Bruce. "Lenny instigated a fight at the original Googies restaurant on Sunset and Crescent Heights," said Daniel Paul of the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee. But the foe outsized Bruce, "and he threw Lenny right through the window."

I \o7WASN'T\f7 \o7ABOUT TO MISS \f7out\o7 \f7on this. The Los Angeles Conservancy had reopened Johnie's to the public for the afternoon, and at last I would get to see the interior of the snappy little red, white and blue building on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue that gave me a lift every time I drove past. I knew nothing of its history, or why it had sat closed and forlorn ever since I moved to L.A.

Johnie's Coffee Shop Restaurant can no longer offer visitors burgers and fries. But it can serve up a taste of an architectural style that's quickly disappearing. Sitting at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, Johnie's is a prime example of Googie, a style of architecture that flourished during the 1950s and early 1960s.

It's a sign of how fast things change that 1950s Los Angeles seems almost as far away as 1750s Boston. Luckily there were artists here who caught those soon-to-be-gone moments. One of them is photographer Jack Laxer, 74, who documented '50s Googie coffee shops in all their futuristic, glossy glory on stereographic three-dimensional color film. His images, many never seen before, will be part of a narrated slide show on Nov.