A vintage, roughly 750-square-foot Alta Dena Dairy drive-through in Tustin will reopen as a Starbucks on Thursday, Feb. 1. The former dairy shop, noted for its Googie design, has been repurposed as a new pitstop for the coffeehouse chain, but will keep most of its its architectural allure intact.
After In-N-Out Burger opened California’s first drive-thru in 1948, Alta Dena Dairy followed suit with a similar concept, opening express shops throughout the regionBuilt in the early 1950s.The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it store in Tustin, situated between DK’s Donuts and a Walgreens between Old Irvine Road and Irvine Boulevard, was once one of many Alta Dena Dairy drive-throughs in Southern California. In addition to milk, cheese and other Alta Dena-related fare, customers could purchase sundry items like flour, eggs, meats and paper goods inside the store without having to leave their vehicles.
As Nancy Keefe, daughter of Alta Dena Dairy’s co-founder/owner Harold Stueve, told the Los Angeles Times in her father’s 2006 obituary, “My dad saw that in California, cars were becoming more and more important. He thought it would be a good service to give people a place to get their basics without having to get out of their cars.” For better and for worse, such business savvy helped further cement Southern California’s automobile-driven reputation.
The Alta Dena Express turned into an unofficial landmark over the following decades, one that denizens cherished as much for its diminutive charm as they did for its convenience. Tustin artist Daniel Thomas captured the drive-through’s weathered appeal in his carefully crafted miniature. His small-scale replica paid homage to the shop, which closed in 2021, featuring the same rough-hewn yellow facade and lilliputian reach-in refrigerators with tiny cans of…
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