Ten years ago, the original Taco Bell building in Downey was moved across multiple cities to the fast food chain’s headquarters in Irvine. Ten years later, it’s still sitting there.
Why now: It’s the 63rd birthday of Taco Bell’s founding this week.
Read on … to hear what, if anything, Taco Bell has planned for “Numero Uno.”
Los Angeles has an obsession with moving ginormous things across the city — we love the pure spectacle of it.
There was Levitated Mass, aka the huge boulder at LACMA, that undertook an 11-night journey on surface streets to arrive at the museum in 2012. Later that year, the space shuttle Endeavour did something similar, albeit for a much shorter but no less challenging 12 miles between LAX and the California Science Center.
In November 2015, yet another oversized object snail-crawled across town. This time, the first-ever Taco Bell — a 400-square-foot rectangle with Spanish Colonial Revival arches and tiled roof. In just one night, it traveled through nine cities from its original Downey location to the fast food giant's corporate headquarters in Irvine.
Taco Bell hinted at a grand relaunch, or a sort of memorialization. But 10 years later, in the week of the chain’s 63rd birthday, "Numero Uno" is still there — in the corner of said parking lot under a blue tarp.
The "bell" in Taco Bell is Glen Bell, a serial restaurateur and native Southern Californian who first made a go at it with a hot dog stand in San Bernardino in 1948. Four years later, having sold the stand, he upgraded to selling hot dogs and burgers at another San Bernardino location — across the street from a Mexican restaurant that sold, among other things, hard-shell tacos.
From there Bell's subsequent ventures would focus on the taco — culminating in the founding of Taco Bell at 7112 Firestone Blvd. in Downey on March 21, 1962.
"It's a little shoebox-sized space. It's super small. It's just got a couple little bathrooms in the back, and that's about it," Downey resident George Redfox said. "It was a really cool little building."
Redfox is a founder of the local historical preservation group the Downey Conservancy. Although he never went to that Taco Bell, he said he did go to Taco Raul before it. In 1986, Taco Bell closed the so-called "Numero Uno" location. After housing a number of other restaurants, the building shut down for good and had sat vacant since the end of 2014.
That's when it was slated for demolition. And that's when Redfox and his fellow preservationists stepped in and alerted Taco Bell. The corporation began a media blitz to "Save Taco Bell Numero Uno."
“This is arguably the most important restaurant in our company’s history,” said Brian Niccol, then-chief executive officer of Taco Bell Corp. in a statement at the time. “To think a business like ours, that spans 6,000 restaurants around the globe, started with a walk-up window no bigger than a two-car garage is truly inspirational. When we heard about the chance of it being demolished, we had to step in. We owe that to our fans, we owe that to Glen Bell.”
At 10:30 p.m. on Nov. 19, 2015, the Numero Uno move began. The building arrived early the next morning at the corporate campus in Irvine. The preservation campaign and the move ginned up a tremendous amount of fanfare, with local and national coverage.
"It's very on brand," said Sam Oches, editor in chief of Nation's Restaurant News, a trade publication based in New York. "Taco Bell is a party of one in the restaurant industry as far as what they can get away with."
Oches said the taco chain has cultivated and sustained an image of irreverence and fun with "strokes of marketing genius," like offering a free taco to everyone in the U.S. if parts of a decommissioned space station breaking up in Earth's atmosphere landed on a Taco Bell target floating in the south Pacific Ocean.
"Even though Taco Bell is 60 plus years old, they feel so young and fresh because they're really of this moment where all the young people are on social media and that's what's driving our discourse," Oches added.
So yeah, moving an old building 45 miles across L.A. sounds just about right.
The plan, the company said a decade ago, was to keep the building at its headquarters until "its future use is determined" — a decision that would be made with feedback from fans and the public.
Ten years later, the historic building is still sitting there — with a tarp thrown over it to fend off the elements. The company did dust off the old Numero Uno for a photo op to celebrate the chain's 60th birthday a couple years ago.
But those future plans — they're still in development.
"We love Numero Uno," Taco Bell said in a statement to LAist. "We don’t have any plans to share at the moment for what’s next, but we’ll be sure to bring you along when we do."
Redfox, the Downey preservationist, has ideas.
"For me I'd like to see it placed somewhere in the city. ... Yeah, I would like to see it back here" in Downey, he said.
But he's still grateful that Taco Bell saved Numero Uno from the wrecking ball. After all, Downey plays an important part in the history of American fast food.
"We got the first Taco Bell. We have one of the first McDonald's — number three, actually," Redfox said. "We've also got one of the original Denny's restaurants. A lot of fast food kind of started around this area."