Big donuts of Southern California



The big donuts of Southern California in the United States are frequently photographed examples of 20th-century vernacular roadside novelty architecture. They are landmark oversize donuts designed to attract the attention of potential customers on nearby roadways. In their heyday, according to one critic, the giant donuts were "one of many signs in Los Angeles that bordered on pop art, celebrating the effusiveness of life in the years after World War II. To many Americans, Southern California acquired the image of an orange juice stand shaped like an orange, or a hot dog stand shaped like a hot dog."

History
Randy's Donuts along the 405 freeway near LAX is the most famous of four surviving big donuts constructed by businessman Russell C. Wendell, who started the Big Do-Nut Drive-In chain in the 1940s. (A fifth donut has been converted into a bagel.) At one time there were 10 Do-Nut Drive-Ins with 22 ft-diameter giant donuts. Wendell sold out in the 1970s. Mrs. Chapman's Angel Food Donuts was another chain of about 20 stores that constructed slightly smaller big donuts to advertise their stores. The Donut Hole in La Puente, jokingly described as a "distant cousin" to the rooftop big donuts, is a drive-thru bakery; the gimmick being that drivers enter and exit through the holes in a pair of giant donuts to order and pick up their food. All of these shops and their associated giant donuts are considered representative of Southern California's mid-century "car-culture-induced optimism and ambition, reflected in polychromatic, star-spangled coffee shops, gas stations, car washes, and other structures that once lured the gaze of passing motorists."

Giant donuts and similar oversize object-shaped signs and buildings are generally now prohibited under contemporary municipal construction codes.