In the early 1930s, Kentucky entrepreneur Frank Redford spotted a cone-shaped roadside lunch stand in Long Beach, California — and had the kind of idea that only makes sense if you just go ahead and do it. Flip it over. Make it a room. Build seven of them.
Officially, Route 66 ends at the intersection of Lincoln and Olympic Boulevards in Santa Monica — a stoplight in front of Mel’s Drive-In, about a mile from the water. Federal highway rules in 1936 wouldn’t allow a road to dead-end into the ocean, so that was that.
But nobody stopped at the stoplight.
Colonel J.T. Owen built it in 1924 on the Ozark Trail—two years before the road became Route 66. The station served travelers from the ground floor while the attendant lived upstairs. Over the decades, the building wore the signs of Magnolia, Phillips 66, and Conoco, and even housed Slutz Barbershop after its days as a filling station.