Googie Architecture

It was the 1950s. America was a superpower, and the Los Angeles area was the center of it. The space race was on. A car culture was emerging. So were millions of postwar babies. Businesses needed ways to get families out of their automobiles and into coffee shops, bowling alleys, gas stations and motels. They needed bright signs and designs showing that the future was now. They needed color and new ideas. They needed Googie.

BEFORE Interstate 40 bypassed them and drove a stake through their heart, this broiler of a town on old Route 66 and its modernist landmark, Roy's Motel and Cafe, thumped with life day and night. Roy's atomic-age neon sign competed with the stars three hours east of Los Angeles. It was a beacon of civilization to weary travelers rocketing along America's Mother Road, a sign of hope to motorists whose cars had croaked in the desert heat.

It was 1962, and the Space Race had commandeered world consciousness. The Soviet satellite Sputnik had been launched and two men had already been catapulted into the heavens. In Anaheim, businessman Al Stovall decided to launch his own space program with Stovall's Space Age Lodge, the first in a celestial chain of motels clustered around Disneyland like planets around the sun. The lodge's poolside cabana was a silver geodesic dome called "the Moon House."

WE all think we know what Los Angeles isn't -- those tip-of-the-tongue platitudes: "Not a real city"; "Not a place with history"; "Not a place easily summed up in a sentence -- or sound bite." What we don't know precisely, however, is just what Los Angeles is. That's the monumental task the L.A. Department of City Planning's Office of Historic Resources is undertaking to make sense of -- and give context to -- a region that has often felt diffuse, imprecise and haphazardly imagined.

The closest thing there may be to a certainty in Southern California business (death and taxes aside) is that there will always be a Casa de Cadillac . We're speaking, of course, about the big auto dealer that has occupied the same location on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks since 1948. The business is part of the memories of generations of Valley residents, the towering plate-glass front wall of its showroom an enduring artifact of not only the Southern California car culture of the '50s but Art Moderne "Googie" architecture.

When the last two '50s-style Ships coffee shops shut this summer, tears fell for yet another piece of Los Angeles history and the loss of yet another slice of quirky culture. The aged owner simply couldn't keep going, couldn't compete with those fast-food joints. But a funny thing happened: A new business purchased the liquidated Ships.

Business owners in the Anaheim resort district have repeatedly heard about the grand plans for the 20-acre plot near Disneyland: a trio of luxury hotels, an array of high-end restaurants and shops, and a massive parking structure. So excuse them if they're just a little skeptical when officials say construction on the GardenWalk project could begin as early as May if the City Council approves updated plans March 28.

In the opening frames of "Punch-Drunk Love," Paul Thomas Anderson's cockeyed new romantic fable, a nebbishy, passive-aggressive toilet-supplies salesman named Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) stands by the curb of a generic San Fernando Valley thoroughfare, sipping his morning coffee. We seem to be watching an ordinary man in a prosaic landscape where nothing of consequence ever happens. Then -- violently, unexpectedly, unfathomably -- something does.

Elvis has left the building, but so have James Taylor, Red Skelton, Roberto Duran, the Anaheim Amigos and the California Oranges. The Anaheim Arena, which opened its doors with a Doors concert in 1967, has played host to musicians, comedians, boxers, circuses and ice shows. The Amigos of the American Basketball Assn. and the Oranges of World Team Tennis played there, as did the Harlem Globetrotters, who could be seen for $3 in 1970.