The Fight to Save Googie, the Style of Postwar Optimism (NY Times)

[UrbanImpact]

Fort Lauderdale, FL has quite a few Googies with the most famous being Pier 66 built in 1957. There is a rotating restaurant at the top:

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/01/21/...otel-loom-as-tourism-catalysts-for-2025/

Then there's this one near my house, the Kennan Building built in 1964

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/generated-image-317350605.jpg

[pj3000]

I guess this is Pittsburgh's prime Googie example ?: Mellon Bank branch in Squirrel Hill

[TempleGuy1000]

Sometimes on the East Coast, it is called Doo-wop architecture for the genre of music that was popular at the same time.

Wawa announced last month they will build another store with the style at the Jersey Shore.
https://www.phillyvoice.com/wawa-wildwood-nj-doo-wop-gas-station-rite-aid/


https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/53944838013

A popular retro chain in Delaware, The Charcoal Pit, has a lot of the vibes


Penn Fruits was a popular grocery store chain in the Delaware Valley for many decades. In the 50s and 60s, they built a number of identical stores that had a lot of the hallmark features.



A few of Philadelphia's libraries, municipal buildings, and recreational centers from the 50s and 60s have some of the characteristics, but fall more in the modernist bucket imo.


the most famous being the Love Park Welcome Center, aka Philly's Flying Saucer

[BigDipper 80]

Googie is kind of like porn, you know it when you see it. Outside of drive-in theater marquees and the motels of Wildwood it hardly exists anywhere but southern California any more where Armet and Davis did most of their work. A number of Vegas casinos could have been considered Googie but they're pretty much all demolished now. The line between Modernism and Googie has already been mentioned a couple of times but one of the other defining features is that the building itself becomes a form of advertising, like the "ducks" and "decorated sheds" outlined in Learning from Las Vegas. It's really just a more populist form of modernism (which is where the alternate term populuxe comes from) as it doesn't take an architecture degree to understand what is being communicated. Traditional architects rallied hard against the style for its lack of discipline but I think they were naive to the creativity that went into the coffee shops of the era. If you can find a copy, Alan Hess' book on the style is incredibly informative.