Kwik Way to approval looks like more housing for Oakland

After years of scrapped plans and benign neglect, Oakland’s moldering Kwik Way Drive-In is on the brink of demolition.

The midcentury diner, which over the last decade has intermittently shuttered and reopened on Lake Park Avenue, may soon be replaced by a five-story housing and retail development that will stand as tall as the nearby Grand Lake Theater. Though the project is still in its early stages, it appears to have near-unanimous support from a neighborhood where residents have quibbled for 12 years over what to do with the site.

“This site has been pretty controversial in the past,” said Councilman Abel Guillen, who represents the Lake Merritt district. “But you fast-forward to now, and we’re in this housing crunch, and this (property) is way underutilized.”

The Kwik Way was one of several diners that sprouted up around Oakland during the 1950s and ’60s featuring broad driveways, neon signs and Space Age Googie architecture. Another is Biff’s Coffee Shop at 27th Street and Broadway, which prompted a fight earlier this year when preservationists tried to block plans to replace it with a seven-story apartment building. Those plans are moving forward.

Kwik Way, too, has been a focus of land use battles in gentrifying Lake Merritt. But unlike Biff’s, Kwik Way has not generated an outpouring of nostalgia.

“We do see that commercial Googie retail fronts around town are in trouble, and going fast,” said Naomi Schiff, a member of the Oakland Heritage Alliance, a group that often pressures the city to safeguard old historic buildings in their original form.

“But,” Schiff said, “it’s also true that this neighborhood (Lake Merritt) is hoping for development.”

Yet if area residents have pushed for change, they have also been picky about what it should look like.

More than 12 years have passed since the original Kwik Way shuttered, and community members have killed three plans to replace the old drive-in with a fast-food franchise: a McDonald’s in 2004, Fatburger in 2007 and Dunkin’ Donuts in 2015. Restaurateur Gary Rizzo revived the original burger joint in 2011, only to close shop abruptly in 2014.

For the past year and a half, building owner Alex Hahn has leased the space to Merritt Bakery, promising that the arrangement would only be temporary.

“It’s a poor land use,” said Jim Ratliff, a neighbor who has been outspoken on the fate of Kwik Way ever since 2004, when he helped quash the McDonald’s plan. “It’s now serving as a surface parking lot with a small, low-volume restaurant.”

Ratliff is among several longtime residents who will be happy to see the Kwik Way go, saying that for all its retro charm, the building has become an anachronism. Cars cut through the long wraparound driveway, creating danger for pedestrians. People linger in the wide, empty parking lot after dark, drinking alcohol and leaving heaps of trash, Ratliff said.

“The driveways, the parking lot, the after-hours people hanging out and drinking, the trash — we’ve endured things like that for years,” Ratliff said. “There are many great historic buildings in Oakland that can be reused, but there’s something about these 1950s Googie architecture examples that are built around car-intensive use that just isn’t appropriate anymore.”

The new project, designed by Lowney Architecture, is a wide, curvy building with 50 apartment units overlooking Lake Merritt’s Splash Pad Park. A large movie-theater-style marquee overlooks the ground floor, meant to evoke the flashy signage of the former Kwik Way.

“It’s an exuberant design,” said the firm’s chief Ken Lowney, standing in front of the former Kwik Way on Wednesday morning, as cars puttered in and out of its wide driveways.

Rusted and weather-beaten, the building still has a wide roof with sides that jut out like airplane wings, and a scripted sign that now says Merritt Bakery. Its window displays bear big frosted layer cakes that look like footballs and cheeseburgers.

Lowney’s building would take up what is now a surface parking lot and fill one of the driveways with ground-floor retail — probably a restaurant with patio seating, he said. Drawings of the project evoke the Art Deco designs in Miami Beach, but the curvy shape is an homage to Googie, Lowney said.

The big difference, he added, is that the new project will be dense and pedestrian-friendly — anathema to the 1950s and ’60s ideal of “a big gaping hole for cars to go through.”

If approved, the building could break ground as early as next year.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com