Five Points Car Wash | Los Angeles Conservancy
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Five Points Car Wash

The Five Points Car Wash in Whittier is one of the finest intact examples of Googie car washes in Southern California. Completed in 1963, the car wash is typical of the mid-century style of this roadside property type, exhibiting the flashy, space-age Googie style designed to draw drivers off of major thoroughfares for a quick clean and shine.

It occupies a prime location at an intersection where five major streets come together, hence its name.

The building’s flat, widely overhanging roof shelters the washing apparatus and waiting room/cashier area, stretching the full length of the horizontal building. The roofline is punctuated by huge vertical pylons that pierce the roof and soar far above it with curving and angled lines visible over a wide distance. The car wash is further distinguished by an intact pole sign with two massive points shooting into the air and wonderful early-1960s lettering advertising “Car Wash” in neon.

The Googie carwash is a fairly common building type in Los Angeles, but few of the surviving buildings are as intact and as exuberant as the Five Points.

Sunset Car Wash
Photo by Devri Richmond

Sunset Car Wash

This Sunset Boulevard gem is a low concrete monument to Late Modern architecture, with a tip of the hat to Brutalism.
Photo by Rosalind Sagara/L.A. Conservancy

El Sereno Middle School

El Sereno Middle School (formerly Wilson High) is notable for both its architectural and cultural significance, including for the role it played in the East L.A. Chicano Student Walkouts (Blowouts) of March 1968.
Pann's Coffee Shop
Photo from Conservancy archives

Pann's Coffee Shop

One of the last and best of the iconic futuristic coffee shops designed by the prolific firm of Armet & Davis, its traffic island is an oasis of subtropical planting beneath an immense, hovering "tortoise shell" roof.