The lights go back on at Johnie’s Coffee Shop

Good morning. It’s Friday, May 8. Expect clouds to give way to warm, sunny afternoons today and all weekend, with Mother’s Day touching the eighties east of the 405.

In today’s newsletter, we have the opening of a subway line 65 years in the making, potentially even higher gas prices, and some things to do this Mother’s Day weekend. But first: a new chapter in the history of one of L.A.’s most famous diners.

It fed The Big Lebowski and Reservoir Dogs. It was where Anthony Edwards found out that the world was ending in Miracle Mile. And it was barely spared after the eruption of Mount Wilshire in Volcano. 

Johnie’s Coffee Shop, the striking Googie-style diner on the corner of Wilshire Blvd and Fairfax Ave, has been many things on camera. But one role it has not played for the last 26 years is that of an actual coffee shop. The restaurant closed in 2000, and the building has only rarely been open to the public since — its iconic neon sign has been off for years, too.

That changes today. Johnie’s is throwing the lights on and its doors open at 3 p.m. for an art show and celebration commemorating the opening of the D Line subway.

The building premiered in 1956 as Romeo’s Times Square, designed by the architects behind Pann’s in Ladera Heights and multiple Bob’s Big Boy locations. Johnie’s moved in a few years later, and was bought in 1994 by Dave Gold, the founder of Southern California discount retailer 99 Cents Only, in part to contribute additional parking for a store next door. Gold’s family still owns both buildings today. (L.A. Material is a paying client of another business operated by the Gold family in Los Angeles.)

“This was Dave’s baby,” said Juan Castellanos, a project manager for the reopening who started working for 99 Cents Only thirty years ago. He’s been helping the Gold family maintain Johnie’s for decades, and kept the lights on long after the restaurant closed. Dave Gold, Castellanos said, would call him if he saw even a single flashing bulb was burned out: “He loved to see it all bright every day.”

Gold passed away in 2013, about a year after 99 Cents Only was sold to private equity giant Ares Management. A few years later, the building took on a new purpose — and name — that began with a political stunt.

Dave’s son Howard Gold, who had helped manage the first 99 Cents Only at age 22, was an ardent supporter of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election — as well as an ardent critic of Hillary Clinton. When George and Amal Clooney, Howard Gold’s neighbors in Studio City, hosted a $33,400-a-ticket fundraiser for Clinton, Gold helped gather Sanders supporters to line the streets and shower her motorcade with a thousand one-dollar bills — a statement about “the absurdity around campaign finance laws,” they told KTLA.

The stunt forged a connection. Gold quickly arranged for the Sanders campaign to use Johnie’s as an organizing center — within a month, a mural of Sanders was painted on the building’s Fairfax side.

After Bernie’s 2016 run concluded, grassroots campaign organizers Lauren Hammel and Michelle Manos arranged with the Gold family to continue operating Bernie’s Coffee Shop as a meeting space for aligned community groups and eventually the home base of Community Solidarity Project, a nonprofit founded by Manos in 2021.

“It was an extraordinary privilege in my life to be entrusted with such a beautiful place,” Manos told us. “The way that we founded was an art project, essentially,” she said, referring to the dollar bill protest in support of Sanders. “And I like to think that we remained an art project.”

Art is at the center of the building’s next phase, too — works by L.A. native Gary Baseman will be on display Wednesdays through Sundays until June 14th. The ringleader of the effort to reopen Johnie’s for the show is another Gold family member: 27-year-old Cole Schiffer, Dave Gold’s grandson. This isn’t Schiffer’s first or even second art show on the block this year — he’s also hosted events at the former 99 Cents Only next door and a vacant Sizzler restaurant down the block. 

Workers have been painting and renovating the building on an aggressive timeline to ensure that the reopening would coincide with the activation of the D Line subway — a day with significance for the Gold family. Dave Gold, Schiffer said, was an anti-automobile activist before he started the 99 Cents Only chain — in family lore, Gold even sued the American Automobile Association for their ability to lobby against transit projects. Schiffer wants the building his grandfather loved to be lit up and publicly open again on the day the Wilshire subway finally comes to life.

“That was the real unifier for us as a family, was excitement around this train,” he said.

L.A. Material will be giving out free ice cream for new subscribers in the parking lot at Johnie’s Coffee Shop as part of the Wilshire Subway Celebration event today from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

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D TU MAMA TAMBIEN: For more on the long, fraught journey that brought us to today’s D Line opening, Jenny Jarvie at the L.A. Times goes deep on the history of this potentially transformative transit project — and why it took 65 years to build.

MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO PUMP: As the last oil tanker to pass through the Strait of Hormuz docked at the Port of Long Beach this week, California lawmakers are warning that the state could be in for more hikes to gas prices in the weeks to come.

THROW MOMMA ON THE TRAIN: Over at Streetsblog LA, transit historian Cooper Crane makes the case for a regional transit model for Greater L.A. — a vision that seems more remote as the Metrolink commuter rail, the only transit line operating in all of L.A.’s neighboring counties, implements “significant service cuts.”

DON’T HOTEL MOM THE BABYSITTER’S DEAD: CalMatters reporters filed a hundred records requests to get answers about the successes and failures of Homekey, a $3.8 billion COVID-era state program to repurpose hotels as transitional and supportive housing for people who are homeless.

YOUR MAMA DON’T ANTS: Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and if you’ve got $1,200 to spend this Mother’s Day, you can reserve a blanket for a picnic at the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, catered by Canyon Grocer. 

FLY YOUR MOTHER DOWN: The arts organization Clockshop puts on its annual Kite Festival this Saturday at Los Angeles State Historic Park from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free with a $5-$10 suggested donation. (Read about the reigning two-time kite champion in our newsletter from yesterday.)

HOW I NET YOUR MOTHER: Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon is putting on its 26th “MOMentum Place” Mother’s Day show at 2 p.m. this Sunday, featuring aerial and circus performers with an optional brunch.

PIG MOMMA’S HOUSE: It’s the opening weekend of the L.A. County Fair — live milking demonstrations, “Spam wonton tacos,” and livestock competitions (including pig races) will be on offer at the Pomona Fairplex from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. through the end of the month.

For today’s peek inside our subscriber-only Discord server, L.A. Material Creative Producer @Pablo Goldstein shares a read in our new #books channel:

“CURRENTLY READING: The Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta. My teenage introduction to Hunter S Thompson's work was through his ESPN.com Page 2 columns, where he would rant about his illegal sports gambling and the Bush administration on a Disney-owned website (much different times). I recently added his Hey Rube!, a collection of those essays, to my Thriftbooks cart but realized I knew very little of the "fat Samoan lawyer" who joined HST on his most famous trip. So I was very excited to find out he had written some books of his own, including this one which chronicles his work as a lawyer for various Chicano Movement characters in L.A. throughout the late 60s and early 70s.”

AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “Untitled” by James Baldwin.

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