BLVD Cafe

What a great memory!  I remember this cafe.  My memory of it was that it was on the decline or that it was a holdout against modernity.  Nobody that I knew ate here, or at least they never told me that they ate there.  That may not be totally correct.  Someone may have mentioned before that they grabbed a burger and chili there.  But that is it.  I do remember a large avocado tree in the empty lot to the east of this cafe.  I remember cutting through it occasionally to make my way over past the Santa Teresita Hospital and on up to Royal Oaks for my walk home.  I loved that walk.  I never thought of the distance of that walk, only the time.  It would be 30 to 45 minutes.  But I loved that 30 to 45 minutes.  I loved getting lost in thoughts, dreams, and assessments of the day’s activities, pacing my walk and enjoying anybody who crossed my paths.  Step by step, foot by foot with a cushioned grind of the sand and pebble beneath my tennis shoes.  The sun was never a bother.  In fact, I welcomed it.  I used to walk the trail behind the row of 2-bedroom house on the north side of Royal Oaks Drive.  This was my path.

Susie Tomasian, BLVD Cafe, 1982.  Don’t know if she is connected to the Tomasians who lived one home north of the northwest corner of Greenbank and Royal Oaks.  When I was in the 5th grade at Valley View, with Mr. Abrams or Abrahams, I walked Tammy Tomasian home carrying her books.  It wasn’t until I sat behind her in Mr. Sheehan’s 7th grade Art class that I learned that she did not idolize me.  I hope that any readers will find my hyperbole a little funny.

Here is an April 13, 1989 LA Times article on the closing of the restaurant. 

Nobody kept a tally of how many hamburgers were fried on the Blvd. Cafe’s grill before they turned it off for good, but the number must be astronomical.

When Shirley Halburian’s family took over the little wood-slat orange juice and hamburger stand in Duarte in 1946, it fronted Route 66. The highway was “the mother road” back then, a humming 2,200-mile stretch of blacktop that connected heartland America to California. Just about anyone coming to Los Angeles had to pass the Blvd. Cafe, which got its name because the full “Boulevard” wouldn’t fit on the sign above it.

“All I heard when I was a kid was that everybody gets to California on Route 66,” said Halburian, 49, during an unfettered closing celebration at the cafe over the weekend, complete with a jukebox pumping out oldies-but-goodies and family members passing out free beer and food.

The Blvd. Cafe, seized through eminent domain by the city’s redevelopment agency, will be bulldozed next week to make way for a long-planned seven-acre shopping center. The Trammell Crow Development Co. project will be anchored by a supermarket, a city spokesman said.