Van De Kamp's Windmill, Harold Bissner 1967

            We first moved to Southern California in 1958; my father John A. Locke, had just accepted a position as Assistant Engineer at Van de Kamp's Holland Dutch Bakery.  Moving from Portland, Oregon, my folks looked for a house close to work with good schools; they settled in Glendale, California and dad went to work everyday at the Van de Kamps plant located at the corner of San Fernando Road and Fletcher Drive.  At the time, windmill restaurants like the one above, dotted the Southern California landscape.  The restaurants always had a section where you could purchase goodies from the bakery, served by waitresses dressed in Dutch costumes.  During the summers, my brother Dave and I would accompany my dad down to the plant and give him a hand replacing the caster wheels on the carts where the baked goods were first placed for cooling and packaging.  Our reward was getting to spend time with each other and stuffing ourselves with pies and cookies from the packages that were not fit for delivery.  The architect, Harold Bissner and my dad were good friends; he was Van de Kamp's "official" architect, designing not only buildings for the bakery but private residences as well.

The Van de Kamp Windmill Restaurant is one of the few remaining and is now a Denny's restaurant located on historic Route 66 in Arcadia, California at 7 E. Huntington Drive (corner of Santa Anita Avenue) . 

UPDATE:  Beginning June 29, 2016, the windmill is slowly spinning again on the last of the Van de Kamp’s windmill restaurants, located in Arcadia. The windmill, motionless since 1989, was restored and switched on in a ceremony yesterday, reports the Pasadena Star-News.

The Denny’s at the corner of Santa Anita and Huntington Boulevard was the first windmill restaurant of Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakery’s coffee shop chain to be built with this cool, windmill design from architect Harold Bissner and Harold Zook. Today, it’s the last of them left, and, according to the LA Conservancy, it’s the last surviving windmill-topped restaurant in all of Southern California, too.

The Googie building opened, windmill spinning, in 1967. The windmill was halted in 1989, when Denny’s took over. The building is around today because of "loud public outcry" when Denny’s tried to demolish the structure in 1999. Denny’s still owns the building, and seems to appreciate the structure more fully now: They footed the $100,000 bill for a new motor, reinforced blades, and LED lights. (The windmill lights up at night.)

"It’s a bigger bill than we initially thought," says Denny’s president and CEO John Miller, who was present for the switching-on ceremony. "But we figured when the windmill is still spinning in 100 years, the cost won’t matter."

The windmill is "set to spin all day, every day, for the foreseeable future," says the Star-News.

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Taken in: United States / California / Arcadia / Downtown Arcadia (show map)

Taken on: January 1, 2013

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