Where Were You In '62? - At Ralphs!

A bit more on Ralphs before a brief pause in the story. This photo is from 1962, and appears once again by courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library. This photo was commissioned by Foster and Kleiser, the famous billboard company, for an unknown promotional purpose. The sign is typical of Ralphs (much more so than the one shown in the last post) in the 1958-62 period.

Note the multi-colored “LIQUORS” sign, standard issue for many L.A. supermarkets (sort of suggests a similar psychological effect to saying “free balloons”, right?), and the sale posters above the awning instead of their usual place of honor on the store windows. I can picture the store’s maintenance man up there changing the posters, cigarette dangling, muttering “Beans down 2 cents a can. Why don’t they make up their @#%& minds?”

That also looks like a pick-up window at the snack bar/café. If anyone remembers this location, please clue us in!

Mike S. was kind enough to identify this store as the Ralphs located on Roscoe Boulevard and Topanga Canyon in Canoga Park (San Fernando Valley). Check out the comments section of this post for his great memories of the area!

Ralphs Granada Hills, 1959

I dig this store the most! It sends me. This is none other than the Granada Hills Ralphs, which opened in November 1959 at 17020 Chatsworth Street, at the Balboa Boulevard intersection. This store is a stunning example of the individuality and high-concept architecture that Ralphs applied to its new supermarkets on a regular basis. A Ralphs manager summed up their philosophy for Progressive Grocer at the time – “We try to make each new unit a pilot store in which a good many architectural and merchandising experiments are undertaken - rather than getting a good pattern and cutting the new stores to fit that pattern”.

What a striking sight this store must have been, with its 60-foot tall tower sign out front. If retail store signs today showed such taste and restraint, the world would be a better place, don’t you think? The triple-faced sign featured a rotating quadruple “R” on top and mirrored spheres, long before they were called “disco balls”, suspended below the sign. For those who collect such information, the original cost of the large spheres was $500, the small ones $100. The building itself was an all-pink structure (with a large expanse of glass) with another knockout feature in the store’s peaked roof, which sported a pattern of huge white diamonds against a dark red background, all executed in Arizona natural colored pebbles, described as a “natural rock roof”. Wow. The interior, according to Ralphs’ press release, was “a pale apple green, creamy white and a wonderful shade of soft pink, all accented by the gleam of chrome and stainless steel”.

The store opened with a four-day “International Song-Dance-Food Festival”, featuring 250 folk dancers from 27 nations, the Tinkertown Train, Eddie Cletro and his band, and last but not least, Flippo the Clown. An hour-long live TV broadcast (not an uncommon occurrence for L.A. supermarket openings in those days) went out on the first evening on KHJ-TV. To top it off, there was a preview of the 1960 International Auto Show in the store’s parking lot. Almost enough to make you forget the milk.

In 1965, the store underwent a complete interior remodeling that received a great deal of press attention for its “departmentalized” approach. The peak-roofed structure still exists, though the building has been expanded. Unfortnately, the pebble roof has long since been either been covered over or replaced, the sign long ago relegated to history. It is now home to a Walgreens and a Staples.

Fifties Ralphs

A couple of Ralphs stores from the beginning and the end of the 1950’s, a decade that saw the chain greatly expand its reach within greater Los Angeles. Architecturally, these aren’t as easy to categorize as the Streamline Moderne stores that preceded them or the Modernist stores that followed, but they were nonetheless certainly pleasing enough.

The first store was located in the Westdale section of Los Angeles, at the intersection of National and Sepulveda Boulevards, and opened in November 1949. The photo, taken approximately eight years later, shows off the store’s unique “checkerboard” pylon. The L.A. Times article announcing the store stressed its self-service philosophy, as expressed by the new store’s perceptive manager – “Modern women like to pick their own food without the aid of a sales middleman”.

The second store opened in Gardena in April 1958. This is one of those stores where a basic design was transformed into something special, in this case via the addition of a very impressive “sweeping curved facade”, as the Times described it. Similar design principles were often adapted for much larger, more "significant” buildings such as airport terminals or downtown civic centers in that era.

To my knowledge, neither of these stores still stands.

Well, my knowledge has just been expanded. Jeff, who has brought us up to date on the fate of many L.A. area stores, informs us that the Westdale store still exists as a Ross Dress for Less store!

A Streamlined Approach For Ralphs

After adding a flurry of new stores in the late 1920’s, Ralphs settled into a slower expansion mode, opening an average of one new store a year. By the mid-thirties, the chain was once again ready to crank up the pace. The new Ralphs stores, though very different in appearance from those that went before, were striking indeed in their own right.

Ralphs’ architect of choice, once again, was Stiles Clements. In 1937, the Morgan, Walls and Clements firm was reorganized with Clements in charge, adopting his name as well – "Stiles O. Clements Associated Architects and Engineers" as their new name henceforth.

These new stores were designed in the Streamline Moderne style, a variant of art deco, which utilized such design elements as rounded corners, curves, grilles, narrow bands of windows (often of glass blocks) and occasionally nautical elements, such as porthole windows. Structures in this style had long, clean lines, oftentimes featuring sleek pylons or other projectiles. The most typical building finish was cement with a white stucco veneer. The 1933-34 “Century of Progress” Chicago World’s Fair was largely composed of Streamline Moderne buildings, mesmerizing the throngs of folks who descended on Chicago from all over to attend the fair. It was a look that represented speed, modernity and industrial progress. I suspect that many Americans, whether or not they attended the Chicago World’s Fair, were thrilled at the first sight of a new Streamline Moderne structure in their area.

Clements was an ideal choice to implement this new look for Ralphs, as Richard Longstreth’s excellent book The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941 suggests – “(Clements) proved ever adroit at perceiving shifts in taste, manifesting them in ways that made it seem as though he had precipitated the change”. High praise indeed. In 1936, the first of these stores opened, at 4641 Santa Monica Boulevard, near the Vermont Avenue intersection. More Streamline Moderne Ralphs’ followed in quick succession – Beverly Hills, North Hollywood, Santa Monica, Whittier, Burbank, Inglewood (Manchester and Crenshaw), Los Angeles (4366 S.Figueroa St. and Exposition and Crenshaw) and Sherman Oaks before the outbreak of World War II.

This expansion increased not only the chain’s footprint but its prestige as well, with the possibility that each new Ralphs store “could have a considerable impact on its environs” notes Longstreth. “Standing in sharp contrast to its older neighbors, the facilit(ies were) conceived to draw a substantial clientele away from a number of existing establishments”. Undoubtedly, they succeeded in a big way.

With the advent of World War II, Ralphs’ new construction, like that of most everyone else, ground to a halt. A relatively few Streamline Moderne stores were built afterwards, the style having fallen out of favor by that time.

The first and second photos are courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Security Pacific National Bank Collection and show the Exposition and Crenshaw, Los Angeles and Third and Wilshire, Santa Monica locations respectively. The third photo, from the book Modern Super Markets and Superettes (Progressive Grocer, 1956) shows what I believe is the Third and Vermont, Los Angeles location, one of the very last streamlined stores (looking closely, it's really much more of a streamline/modern hybrid in this case), which opened in 1948. Below are two great full page Grand Opening ads from the Manchester and Crenshaw store (1939), and the Exposition and Crenshaw store (1940), from an era when grocery chains took out lavish 16-to-20 page advertising sections in papers such as the Los Angeles Times to trumpet the opening of a new store. The “free food shows” were very much the standard for gala grand openings in those days (replaced in later years by giveaways of free corsages for the ladies, free balloons for the kiddies, free donkey rides for anyone willing, and the obligatory personal appearance by Pinky Lee). The last item is a Ralphs ad from 1947 showing a veritable tower of plenty, topped by a Ralphs milk carton sporting the pylon tower from the Beverly Hills store. Kind of puts “milk carton reading” in league with cereal box reading, at least in my book.

Ralphs Westwood Through the Years

Here’s a collection of views, in reverse chronological order (more or less), of what is arguably the most famous early Ralphs store, no doubt due in part to the happy fact that the building still stands in beautiful condition. This of course is the Westwood Village Ralphs, a Russell Colllins-designed masterpiece, which opened on November 21, 1929 at the corner of Westwood Blvd. and Lindbrook Drive. Coincidentally, the (much more conventional looking) Safeway opened down the street the same week.

Westwood Village, whose origin dates to 1925, is located in west Los Angeles, adjacent to the UCLA campus. Westwood was originally developed by brothers Ed and Harold Janss, who saw the potential for developing an upscale retail “village” to augment UCLA. The Janss Investment Corporation initially mandated a Mediterranean style architectural design for all Westwood Village structures, though this seemed to quickly morph into a blend of “Mediterranean/Spanish/Art Deco/whatever you want to call it”. Westwood Village has long been a subject of enthusiastic study in the architectural community, and many developments throughout America in the decades since have tried to emulate the “Westwood feel”.

The Ralphs supermarket was just one of many classic buildings in the Westwood area. Shown in a couple of the photos is the Bank of America branch, a Moroccan-domed structure which was originally the Janss office until they sold it to the bank in 1954. Also visible is the uniquely beautiful Westwood Sears, across the street from Ralphs. The changing appearance of the Standard Oil of California (Chevron) station can be clearly seen as well. Off in the distance in the second and third photos is the tower of the Fox Westwood Village theatre, which opened about a year and a half after the Ralphs store, and then as now has been an in-demand site for major Hollywood movie premieres and preview screenings. Despite the passage of time, the loss of some classic buildings, and the springing up of high-rises all around it, Westwood Village has managed to retain a considerable amount of its charm.

The Westwood Ralphs closed in the mid-1960’s and has since housed a number of different businesses, including a “Bratskeller” café, popular with UCLA students from the late 60’s through the 80’s. The principal tenants now are Peet’s Coffee and Tea (the cylindrical portion, or “cookie jar” as referred to in a 60’s L.A. Times article) and the Mann Festival Theatre in the arcaded section to the right. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. Ralphs returned to Westwood in 2001 when it moved into another classic structure, the former Bullock’s department store which was originally opened in 1932.

The first four photos are postcard views, ranging from the mid-50’s back to the mid-30’s, and come to us courtesy of Aaron from his site Yesterday L.A., a fantastic collection of vintage postcards of the Greater Los Angeles area –well worth seeing if you haven’t already. Photos 5 through 8 are from the Los Angeles Public Library, and again I extend my thanks for their use. Photo number five is from 1940, photographer unknown. Number six, also from 1940, was taken by Herman Schultheis. The seventh photo was taken by no less than Ansel Adams, as part of a photo shoot for a 1941 Fortune magazine article. (I mean, really, why photograph mountain ranges and national parks when these great stores were available as motifs? I’m kidding.) The last photo, from the LAPL’s Security Pacific National Bank collection, photographer unknown, is in some ways the most interesting of all. Taken from a point further back than the others, looking north from south Wilshire Boulevard, you can see the Ralphs store and the tower of the A&P store to the right. The Westwood A&P was another great classic, designed by Allen Siple and opened in 1932. It was torn down in the late 60’s after A&P pulled out of the area. To the left are four magnificent 150 foot tall deco towers, from gas station competitors who were clearly not about to let themselves be outdone by the others – Richfield (predecessor to Arco), Associated (Flying A), Union 76 and Standard Oil (Chevron). These neon-glazed towers were lit at night and could be seen from many miles away. Oh, Southern California in the 1930’s! Where’s a flux capacitor when you need one?