A 53-year-old Googie-style building in Highland Park designed by famed architect Ronald Cleveland, who, along with his business partner Sterling Leach designed more than 100 supermarkets in and around Los Angeles, has won Historic-Cultural Monument Status.

The Shoppers Market building on Avenue 45 and Figueroa Street was awarded the honor Aug. 1 by the Cultural Heritage Commission at a hearing downtown, Highland Park historian and preservationist Charlie Fisher told the Land Use Committee of the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council at its monthly meeting this past Tuesday. Three of the commission's five commissioners were present at the Aug. 1 meeting and all three voted in support of Historic-Cultural Monument status for the Shoppers Market building, which currently houses Superior Grocers. Gerald Gubetan, Councilmember Gil Cedillo's planning deputy, monitored the Aug. 1 hearing but did not speak, Fisher told Highland Park-Mount Washington Patch.

The Shoppers Market building's "space-age" Googie style of architecture originated in 1949, when the architect John Lautner designed a fanciful modernist building for a restaurant named Googie in the City of West Hollywood, according to the Historic-Cultural Monument application for the Shoppers Market building prepared by Fisher. (See attachment.) Fisher, a member of the Highland Park-Garvanza Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, nominated the Shoppers Market building as a Historic-Cultural Monument along with architectural historian and author Alan Hess and Highland Park Heritage Trust President Antonio Castillo, who works as a planner for the City of West Hollywood.

Located at 133 W. Ave. 45, the Shoppers Market building was built in 1960. The building changed ownership in 1965, when the Lucky Supermarket chain bought it out, Fisher said, adding that the red-colored Lucky sign remained a well-known Highland Park landmark for more than three decades. Subsequently, Albertson's bought out Lukcy in 1999 and occupied the building until 2005. After remaining vacant for a little less than a year, the building was bought by Superior in 2006, Fisher said.

"Superior came to the HPOZ board and announced that they're going to redesign the building's façade and give it a more modern look," Fisher said. "One of their arguments was that the board had approved a craftsman design for the Jack in the Box on Avenue 43 and Figueroa."

The HPOZ board told Superior that unlike the former Shoppers Market, the Jack in the Box was not a historic building but a relatively new one, Fisher said.

"They [Superior] were trying to alter a historic building into something it's not," Fisher explained. "If they were going to remodel the interior, we'd have no problem—it needs that. If they were planning to tear the building down, we'd fight that, too." The Highland Park-Garvanza Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, the largest of the 29 HPOZs in the City of Los Angeles, has helped preserve the façade of the former Shoppers Market on four occasions in the past, Fisher said.