Tustin’s Googie-style Alta Dena Dairy becoming a Starbucks

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 region.

Built 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 Mello Yello, cartons of milk and cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “It’s interesting to get the urban decay and some of the stuff that people just walk past,” Thomas told the Orange County Register in 2018. “I just like the building.”

In 2021, the building achieved official status after it was identified as a historic resource in the city’s 2021 Historic Resource Survey “as a rare example of an important automobile-oriented historic property type,” explained Stephanie Najera, communications manager for the city of Tustin.

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While most the the Alta Dena Express’s later-era embellishment, like the slightly rusted metal sign reading “ALTA DENA MILK 2 GAL SPECIAL” bolted to the side of the building or its butter-yellow facade, will no longer be seen, the Googie-style structure will still sport the same design flair as it did when it first opened. “The existing drive-thru building … is of the Googie architectural style born in Southern California,” said Najera. “The style was a modern architectural style that began in the 1950s and was frequently used for coffee shops, gas stations along with other types of buildings.”

When Starbucks came knocking to open shop in the historic space, the city of Tustin required the coffee chain to keep some, if not most, of its original architectural elements. Such adaptive reuse ordinance allows for preservation of older buildings that, due to historic significance or utter beauty, deserve to survive the wrecking ball. “The city asked us to keep the barn sign and the wall-in cooler door, and to leave the wings intact,” said Ed Carlson, superintendent of KDC Construction, the team behind the renovation.

The towering barn sign, noted for its shingled ornamentation and A-frame peak, a design used at several other Southern California Alta Dena drive-throughs, was spruced up with little more than a new Starbucks logo. Midcentury-modern touches, like the two wings that spread from each side of the building (i.e., cantilevered) will remain as-is. And the zig-zag metal rods that hold up the wings, now decked out in a minty hue, keep the midcentury vibe going. The wall-in cooler doors will also stay put.

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Although the former convenience store did have space for customers to breeze in and out, the new Starbucks is drive-thru only, with the same menu found at most of its stand-alone stores. The coffee chain’s employees will take orders and prepare drinks from inside the cozy space, handing them off to drivers idling outside. The parking lot area has been configured to handle the flow and circulation of traffic. Drivers may enter and exit via Old Irvine Boulevard.

Find it: 1062 Irvine Blvd., Tustin