Johnie's Coffee Shop, Los Angeles: architect, style and history

Johnie's Coffee Shop went up in 1956 at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, designed by Louis Armét and Eldon Davis of Armét & Davis, the Los Angeles firm that all but invented the Googie coffee-shop genre. It opened as Romeo's Times Square, became Ram's in the early 1960s, and settled on the name Johnie's shortly after, the building outlasting three identities under one roofline. In 2013 the city named it Historic-Cultural Monument #1045.

the building

The striped roof. The building's signature move is its roof: it rests on rough stone columns and slopes sharply down toward the rear, ending in an abrupt decline meant to suggest a vehicle caught mid-launch, the kind of forward-motion illusion Googie architects borrowed from jet and space imagery of the 1950s.

Neon signage. "Johnie's" is spelled out in massive neon tubing studded with flashing incandescent bulbs across the roofline, turning the sign itself into the building's most visible architectural feature, built to catch the eye of drivers along Wilshire Boulevard rather than pedestrians on foot.

the style

Johnie's is a textbook example of Googie, the car-culture coffee-shop style built to be read at 40 miles an hour rather than studied up close. Architecture writer Alan Hess argued the building and the style it represents "tell us as much about that period in LA history as the bungalows of Pasadena told us about the 1900s or the missions told us about the 19th century," treating a diner as a genuine historical document of its moment.

the architect

Louis Armét and Eldon Davis founded Armét & Davis and became the leading designers of Space Age, or Googie, coffee shops in Southern California, a body of work that also includes the landmark Pann's in Ladera Heights, Norms Restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, and several Bob's Big Boy locations.

significance

Johnie's is now a former coffee shop rather than an operating restaurant, but it was individually designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #1045 in November 2013, and its distinctive roofline has made it one of the most photographed surviving examples of the Googie style.

nearby

May Company Building 220 ft · Streamline Moderne · 1939
Pavilion for Japanese Art 0.2 mi · expressionist · 1988
Saban Theatre 0.8 mi · Art Deco · 1930
Security-First National Bank 1.1 mi · Art Deco
Heinsbergen Decorating Company Building 1.1 mi · Gothic Revival
E. Clem Wilson Building 1.1 mi · Art Deco · 1929

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