This striking Googie structure is no mere eye candy.

It embodies the innovations that emerged from the marriage of car culture with commercial architecture.

And few have studied the fruits of that union more closely than author and collector Jim Heimann.

One of the first children of this marriage was the programmatic architecture.

The whole point was to catch people's eyes.

The idea was if you're driving down, say, La Brea a block away, all of a sudden you see a giant pig snout, you know, and at night it's all lined in neon.

The architecture essentially functioned as signage in itself, right, to advertise what you could do inside.

It's an architectural term, programmatic architecture.

I mean, this was totally condemned by the architects.

This was crap architecture, junk architecture.

And consequently, no one really documented it or paid attention to it.

It's the evolution of the roadside model.

Yeah.

It goes from this kind of simplistic thing into something a little bit more sophisticated, like the drive into the thirties, and then it evolves into let's get rid of the property because we can't make money off of it and it's too expensive anyway.

How can we still get attention So the McDonald's brothers get the golden arches in a place like Simon's that was designed by Wayne McAllister.

He was pretty profound in terms of local architecture.

I mean, he was the architect behind the Bob's Big Boy.

Yes.

Yeah.

They weren't programmatic because by this time the attention was with the pylon mostly.

And the neon is, you know, very important.

Yeah, of course.

A night.

Yeah.

The tango chanter fits into this 22.

Yeah.

The Thomas Center opens up with the Montgomery Brothers and Lawrence Frank, who had a Van de Kamps windmills.

California is quaint.

Ist Highway 89.

Yeah, it's funny because you wouldn't think of it as a highway eating house today, right?

No, it's across from a Best Buy.

Yeah.

You know.

If you look, there's a little stand here that you can see right there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a drive up.

Wow.

So you would drive up here?

They would put your food on a plank, and at that time, these sedans, you know, you could just put it through the sedan with your food on it.

Just a wooden plank.

They just push it.

The experiment with this for two or three years.

And then they abandoned it, and then they came back to it.

But initially, this was the only place that would serve you food in a car.

They were innovators.

They were innovators.

They weren't afraid of doing something really kind of crazy.

1920s, their cars practically everywhere.

Yeah.

Their restaurants Practically everywhere.

Yeah, but what about Southern California?

Made the marriage of those two here so fruitful?

Cheap land is certainly one.

Tons of roadways that aren't very inhabited.

Weather is certainly a factor.

And then you've got Hollywood.

At the time 1920s.

We tend to think of L.A. as just this endless urban sprawl today.

But there were a lot of gaps in that, Right.

Open countryside.

Big gap.

Yeah.

And more.

You can kind of see the idea of, that's Fairfax and Wilshire.

That's where the.

Wow, isn't it?

Academy chain.

Yeah.

You know, but at that time in the thirties.

Late thirties.

Look around there.

Yeah.

There's not much.

So they would find the main highways mostly.

Valley Boulevard would be one.

Foothill Boulevard would be one in the San Gabriel Valley.

Which later became Route 66.

Yes.