Customers began flocking to the Taco Bell in Lafayette, California, just after Christmas, when news got around town that the fast-food outlet was set to close after nearly 60 years of feeding Quesaritos and Crunchwrap Supremes to the people of this leafy San Francisco suburb.
The restaurant closed last week. It was one of the California-born chain's last remaining mission-style outlets from the 1960s, with a trio of arched windows and beige faux adobe brick walls.
The restaurant’s owner, a Las Vegas-based franchisee called Diversified Restaurant Group that operates several hundred Taco Bells, did not respond to inquiries from CoStar News regarding its reason for the closure. Neither did the chain’s parent, global restaurant operator Yum Brands.
Still, word of the impending closure from employees spread fast on social media, and residents of this tight-knit Bay Area community began paying their respects by stopping by to order one last crispy taco.
“It was just busy as all get-out,” said John Kennett of the Lafayette Historical Society and a longtime resident of the town, an affluent community about 20 miles east of San Francisco.
The Taco Bell at 3501 Mt. Diablo Blvd. has served as unofficial town landmark since it opened in 1968. The building’s curved front facade and painted brick still echoes the Spanish colonial look pioneered by Glen Bell, the founder of the quintessential California chain, in the early 1960s.
More than the impassioned response from locals, the restaurant is an example of how the building's “taco adobe” style helped propel the brand to global success as it expanded through the 1970s and became part of PepsiCo Inc.
Six remaining Taco Bell outlets in California and Colorado still operate out of mission-style buildings. Dozens of other former Taco Bells across the country have been converted into rental car agencies, check-cashing businesses, plant nurseries and sushi restaurants. A handful even house Mexican restaurants.
It's not yet clear what the future holds for the Lafayette site where Taco Bell closed on Jan. 13.
Birth of the box
Bell opened the first Taco Bell in Downey, California, near Los Angeles, in 1962, offering his version of five cheap staples such as burritos, tostadas and the beloved enchirito for around a quarter.
Architect Robert McKay, who became famous in design circles for “letting the building be the sign,” designed the distinctive original taco stand-like concept in the pre-drive-thru era.
The original Taco Bells featured a trio of arches containing walk-up order windows and gas fire pits to build ambiance for outdoor diners. The most distinctive feature was perhaps the espadaña, a simplified version of the scalloped front “bell wall” that became the signature of California’s 21 Franciscan missions, complete with an actual, bronze-colored bell, extending the pun on the founder’s last name.
Fast-food chains in the 21st century moved away from their once-distinctive architecture and menus designed to appeal to their core customer base of American kids and their parents in favor of a standardized, fast-casual ethos. McDonald’s traded in its red-and-yellow color scheme and cast of wacky characters from “McDonaldland” for a less controversial, if blander, decor with muted color schemes that could host multiple drive-thru fast-food brands in a single outlet.
Today the vast majority of the 8,200-plus Taco Bell outlets across the United States are housed in nondescript, boxlike buildings.
Dozens of residents in recent weeks posted memories on social media about the Lafayette Taco Bell, though few mentioned the architecture. Instead, they reminisced about riding their bikes there on the way home from school or working there for minimum wage as a first summer job. Others recalled it as a popular late-night stop on the way home from drinks at the RoundUp Saloon.
Resident Mark Harrigan recalled stopping at the Taco Bell for takeout on his way home from work in the late 1970s and eating his lunch while watching “Family Feud” on TV. “That memory sticks with me to this day,” he told CoStar News in an email.
Vanished era
To be sure, not everyone has embraced the outpouring of nostalgia surrounding a global fast-food brand. A few people on social media suggested that folks who are sad about the outlet closing could simply travel a few miles to neighboring towns like Walnut Creek or Moraga to get their Taco Bell fixes.
Suzanne Iarla, a spokesperson for the city of Lafayette, said she had no information about any plans for the building, which is owned by a Lafayette firm, Dudum Financial and Insurance Services. She suggested a brewery that’s set to open in town soon might be “more newsworthy.”
Lafayette’s Taco Bell is hardly the first fast-food spot to be mourned as a historic icon. After the first Taco Bell in Downey — affectionately named "Numero Uno" — shuttered a decade ago and was threatened with demolition, the company arranged for the 400-square-foot building to be transported by truck down Interstate 5 to Taco Bell’s corporate headquarters in Orange County.
A crowd gathered to say goodbye to the first Wendy's in Columbus, Ohio, when it closed back in 2007 due to lagging sales. And in 2024, students in State College, Pennsylvania, held a candlelight vigil to protest the news that a McDonald's was being torn down to make way for a 12-story mixed-use building.
Last year, a mission-style Taco Bell dating from 1966 in Santa Barbara became the focus of a preservation battle, with locals arguing it should be landmarked as a rare surviving example of the chain’s early architecture. The city rejected the application, saying the building had undergone too many renovations over the years to qualify. The chain later said it planned to renovate the Santa Barbara Taco Bell.
Some have celebrated the old Taco Bells as part of a vanished era of fast food when people ordered at a Jack in the Box drive-thru from a giant clown head with a microphone, and McDonald’s had a full cast of heroes and villains from Ronald McDonald to the cheeseburger-stealing Hamburglar and his goofy purple sidekick, Grimace.
'Part of their past'
Kennett, the Lafayette historian and a resident of the town since 1950, marked the closing of this piece of history by recounting a tale he dubbed “Lafayette’s Great Taco Bell Heist.” In a time “long before fast food went digital,” he wrote on Facebook, a group of teens allegedly stole the property's bell “in the dead of night,” he wrote, “fueled by teenage bravado and probably too many bean burritos.”
One version of the story had it that the pranksters managed to pry the bell loose, only to see it crash clanging to the ground, while another said they stashed it in some bushes while being pursued by a policeman. One way or another, it disappeared. In Kennett’s telling, the management replaced the bell with spares that were “kept in the back” until eventually those vanished too. The chain filled in the niche with bricks and “the era of real bells quietly came to an end.”
Today, the old bells have been replaced by a purple-and-white plastic logo with simple lines for use across brick-and-mortar and digital marketing platforms. The old bells still perhaps exist in closets or garages — they still show up from time to time on eBay — and in the fond memories of customers.
“When people have been going to the same place for 40 or 50 years, it sort of means something to them,” Kennett said. “It’s like a part of their past is gone.”