Cadillacs and Big Boys

I've got a soft spot for Bob's Big Boy restaurants. The food is nothing special, but I always liked the iconic Big Boy statue as a kid, and my late grandfather, who lived to be nearly a hundred, was a ordering his bacon and eggs from Frisch's, the midwestern Big Boy equivalent, well into his 90's. Until about a month ago, the greater LA area had at least three Big Boy restaurants. One in Glendale, one in Burbank, and one on Wilshire Blvd next to Lou Ehlers' Cadillac dealership. At the end of May, it was announced that the Big Boy on Wilshire had been served with an eviction notice to make way for a new BMW showroom. If you ask me, Los Angeles isn't exactly suffering from a BMW shortage, but I digress. I was sorry to see the Big Boy go, and I comiserated with a coworker of mine, who lived in the area and liked to pop over to Bob's for a chocolate malt now and then. This same coworker called me near the end of my workday yesterday to tell me that the former Bob's Big Boy was about to vanish from the earth, and that someone had spray painted some things on the building. He suggested that if I had a camera that I might want to stop by there after work and try to get some shots before it disappeared. This seemed like a good idea to me, so I grabbed my cellphone camera (source of most of the photos here on whatmakesjeffyrun) and walked the seven blocks from CEG headquarters down to Bob's. First thing's first, I took a shot of the friendly Big Boy retaurant sign:

Next I turned to the shell of the restaurant itself, which had been surrounded by chain link fence. My favorite shot that I took from outside of the fence sums up the situation nicely:

Suddenly I realized that I wasn't alone. A man who looked to be in his early 40's approached and expressed his outrage over the situation. He had also come to take some photos and asked me if I wanted to hop the fence and look around inside. I wasn't so sure, but I did want to get a closer look, so I agreed. Shifting into commando mode, we scaled a phone booth and hopped the fence to pay our last respects to the Big Boy. Once we were inside, "Dante" (he swore that was his birthname, and who am I to argue?) began scavenging for souvenirs, all the while ranting about how unfair the whole thing was. Meanwhile, I set about getting some more photos for posterity. It was clear that whoever had visited before us had a pretty good idea of who deserved the blame:

Whatever had happened, it was obvious that the place had been cleared out in a hurry. All the windows were broken, the floor was covered in broken glass, and they hadn't even bothered to get all the foodstuffs out of the kitchen:

After a while I started to get nervous that the cops might show up, or worse, that Dante might decide for some reason to pick up a shard of glass from the Big Boy floor and slit my throat. I probably misjudged him, though, because when I said I had to go, he offered to help me back over the fence. Soon I was back on the Wilshire side of the fence. I turned to go, but Dante stopped me one last time. He began rummaging around for something in the bushes. For some reason, I waited, and that's when Dante did something kind of great. He reached down in the bushes and pulled out a glass bowl of Bob's Big Boy rolls, wrapped in cellophane. Like some sort of ancient rite of diners, he lifted the bowl over the fence and set it down on top of the phone booth. "I just thought it would be cute," he explained. I had to agree.