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Saturday, January 22, 2011

Frostie Freeze Meets La Salsa


Here's a couple of quick "then & now" photos from Los Angeles:

Middle America "Frostie Freeze" tranformed into a Latin America "La Salsa".

Burgers tranformed to Tacos.

Joe transformed to José.

Loss An-je-les tranformed to Loce Ahng-hail-ais

Located at 22800 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, this stand was originally a Frostie Freeze. Built in 1949, it had a larger than life "road side attraction" Burger guy on the roof. This photo was taken by yours truly back in 1984.

In 1987 the restaurant was sold to the La Salsa chain, and the Burger guy was tranformed into the Taco guy. Here's a link to the changes that were made. Additional improvements were made by artist Gabriel Ortiz in 1998 (see comments below). 

While these road side attraction figures are not unique to Los Angeles, this is the only one I'm aware of that's received this kind of extreme make-over. Certainly symbolic in many ways of Los Angeles. That would be the real Los Angeles (not the L.A. everyone sees in the movies).


View La Salsa, Malibu in a larger map

.© 2011 www.experiencingla.com

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Dear David from LA, thank you for your informative post from 2011. My only correction would be to point out that your photo of the "Taco Guy" dates from my 1998 repaint in which I made substantial improvements to the colors, the facial expression, the scale in the stripes of the sarape, and the tromp l"oeil of the sombrero. To my credit, my repaint being misperceived as the original was codified when Dennis Hopper had a fiberglass copy made of it for his home in the early aughts.

David from L.A. said...

Thank you, Gabriel. Wonderful to get this additional information.

I'm not sure of the current status of the restaurant. I drove by several months ago, perhaps a year, and it looked closed. Hopefully, whatever goes it will take advantage to Burger Guy/Taco Guy.