The massive doughnut signs that act as landmarks across Southern California’s low-rise landscape are slowly melting away— leaving a hole in the skyline.
The iconic signs shaped like massive doughnuts — that rest on top of drive-up restaurants — are ubiquitous to Angelenos and have been featured in blockbuster films and television shows to signal LA.
In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark eats a box of doughnuts while sitting inside the hole of the Randy’s Donuts sign. While in the music video for Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” a shop employee dances in front of the infamous O.
The signs are “almost like the Hollywood sign, in some ways,” Adrian Scott Fine, president of the LA Conservancy told SFGATE.
“If you’re going to experience LA, you need to experience a giant doughnut,” Fine told SFGATE.
The giant rooftop doughnuts started popping up in the 1950s but are slowly disappearing as land values sore and developers squeeze out the last of SoCal’s mid-century whimsical architecture.
“A lot of those were taking up spaces that were vacant land, and the area hadn’t really developed yet, or it was kind of happening at the same time, and so land wasn’t as expensive,” Fine told SFGATE.
As the neighborhoods developed around the sites of the giant sugary treats, the lots they occupied became more desirable, and much more valuable, according to Fine, who spoke with SFGATE. “And so that’s how they also got pushed out, because of the development pressures of the city that was growing.”
When the original huge doughnut was dreamed up by Russell C. Wendell– who opened Big Donut Drive-In in 1951– he had to hire an architect and structural engineer to have them designed and put together using rolled steel bars covered in sand, cement, and water, according to the LA Conservancy.
Today building the same sign would cost substantially more, and would likely be too expensive to attempt.
“Although there are more efficient ways to build something like this now, a modern big doughnut would be cost-prohibitive given different building and seismic codes, Fine told SFGATE. “It would be much more difficult to actually achieve that today.”
The doughnuts that remain are beloved by local residents, who have fought — with some success — to keep the locations from being demolished.
“While it may seem like we still have a lot of the giant doughnuts, we’ve lost a lot,” Fine told SFGATE.
While there’s no official count on how many big doughnuts remain, based on architectural surveys, less than a dozen remain. They include, Randy’s Donuts in Inglewood, Dale’s Donuts in Compton, the Donut Hole in La Puente, and Donut King in Gardena.
