Jun 12 2024
Few restaurants capture mid-century Southern California quite like Bob’s Big Boy. There is the towering neon sign glowing beside the boulevard, the smiling Big Boy mascot holding his double-decker hamburger, the sweeping roofline, the expanses of glass, and the parking lot filled with automobiles. Add a chocolate shake and a plate of fries, and the …
Jun 10 2024
Perched high above the Hollywood Hills like a spacecraft that has stopped briefly on its way across Los Angeles, the Chemosphere House is one of the most instantly recognizable homes of the mid-century era. Its octagonal living space appears to float above a steep hillside, balanced improbably on a single narrow concrete column while broad …
May 29 2024
Palm Springs looks a little like someone dreamed up the perfect mid-century vacation town and then placed it beneath a wall of mountains in the California desert. Tall palms line streets filled with low-slung modernist buildings, swimming pools shimmer behind privacy walls, vintage signs survive beside stylish hotels, and the San Jacinto Mountains rise so …
May 23 2024
Rising above Brussels like an enormous molecular model dropped into the landscape, the Atomium is one of the most extraordinary survivors of the Atomic Age. Nine gleaming spheres are connected by giant tubes, forming a structure that seems equally suited to a science-fiction movie, a laboratory of the future, or a 1950s vision of life …
Sep 07 2019
Some of the best places to see on the long Rt. 66 stretch between Tulsa and Los Angeles This summer my daughter, her boyfriend, and I took our longest Route 66 road trip yet: from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Los Angeles, California, tracing the route that many Oklahomans took in the ’30’s, as fictionalized in The …
Mar 12 2017
This weekend my friends and I enjoyed a rainy yet amazing tour of downtown Tulsa’s Modern architecture guided by the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture. I always tell people that two of my favorite things about Tulsa are the friendly people and the architecture, and many of my favorite T-town buildings were covered in the tour. …
