The googie landmark has served up its famous zucchini bread and jazzy architecture for over 50 years

Great examples of googie architecture are rare and special treasures. The flamboyant architectural style that got its start in L.A. in the 1940s was our own unique flavor of modernism popular with owners of low-priced, high fashion restaurants. The flashy buildings with even flashier signs mesmerized drivers and pulled them in for a quick patty melt at lunchtime and back for an elaborate Sunday dinner with the whole family.

Shakers in South PasadenaCredit: Photo by Ruth Hara

“The midcentury restaurant designs are an important part of our culture of the 1950s and 60s,” says historian Charles Fisher, who landmarked Astro in Silver Lake and is a regular at Shakers. “We’d frequent places like Prebles or Bob’s Big Boy because we knew we could get a friendly waitress and a good meal.”

Credit: Photo by Chris Nichols

Some of the best remaining examples of the style, like Norms La Cienega and Johnie’s at Wilshire and Fairfax, are registered as City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments and have some protection against alterations or demolition. The most renowned googie coffee shops in Southern California were designed by the master architects at Armet & Davis, who created hundreds of these buildings and spread the style around the country. Their 1958 Stanley Burke’s in Sherman Oaks is currently being restored by Chick-fil-A, but most of their work has been lost to the vagaries of commercial real estate.

That is not the case in South Pasadena, where one of their great googie buildings lives on as Shakers. The family restaurant may be the only example of googie architecture in that bucolic city and it was recently targeted for new apartments. “A surface parking lot just south of the 110 Freeway in South Pasadena is slated to be redevelopment with senior housing, architecture firm KTGY announced last week,” Urbanize LA recently reported, ignoring the landmark taking up much of said parking lot.

Credit: Photo courtesy Armet Davis Newlove

The proposed project is a 7-story Spanish Revival-style building with 287 units targeted at seniors with amenities like a pool and gymnasium. Seventeen percent of the apartments would be deemed “affordable.” The project was designed by local architects Kate and Odom Stamps. Mr. Stamps serves on the board of the South Pasadena Preservation Foundation, which has not made a public statement on the project.

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Shakers has been in the building since 1971, but it was originally built as Prebles. “The designs were similar to Pann’s,” recalls architect Victor Newlove, a partner at Armet Davis Newlove. Sixty years ago, a brash young entrepreneur from Arcadia named Richard Preble walked into the architect’s offices to pick up drawings for his new chain of coffee shops. “He wore outrageous loud colored clothes,” recalls Newlove.  “We had a hard time collecting the firm’s fees.”

Prebles matchbook coverCredit: Photo by Chris Nichols

Newspapermen swooned over the restaurateur, raving about his talent and creativity. One compared him to the actor James Dean. Preble had a dream to build sixty lavish coffee shops with his name above the door, with the idea that future franchisees would pay for the honor. He would create the first handful as proof of concept and then pass the baton to his underlings. “This young dynamic executive adheres to the theory that people should be given the best food money can buy and at the most economical prices,” the Pasadena Independent gushed in 1965. “After all, where else can you get a Beef Stroganoff dinner for $1.45?”

Preb’s Drive Thru concept by Armet & DavisCredit: Photo courtesy Armet Davis Newlove

The South Pasadena location opened in May of 1965 and was followed by nearly identical stores in Alhambra and Highland Park. Many additional sites were discussed, as well as a drive-thru fast-food concept called “Prebs,” also designed by Armet & Davis, but it appears that only three were completed.

“He came into the office to collect some permit plans,” Newlove recalls. “I told the secretary not to give him the drawings unless he left a check. He handed her the check and she gave him the plans. The check was unsigned.”

Cantilevered counter stools at ShakersCredit: Photo by Chris Nichols

Preble’s dreams of a restaurant empire were short-lived, but the genius designs he commissioned live on. Plus…Shakers is a pretty darn good coffee shop and their zucchini bread is outstanding! Urbanize says construction is expected to begin in 2026, meaning Shakers could close anytime after next month.

Jake Hook, of L.A.’s new Diner Preservation Society, recently commandeered a booth at Shakers to discuss the recent losses of historic restaurants in Southern California. “These places are institutions and worthy of respect,” the Santa Monica-based philosophy professor says. “In L.A. progress is taken for granted a little more. You can do away with the past more easily here… Is this going to be a city of just apartments? We need a city worth living in.”