The oldest mcdonalds restaurant is a hamburger stand at 10207 Lakewood Boulevard on Florence Avenue in Downey, California.It was the third McDonald’s restaurant ever and opened on August 18, 1953.
History:
It was Richard and Maurice McDonald’s second franchised restaurant prior to Ray Kroc’s involvement with the company, and it still has the two original 30-foot (9.1 m) ‘Golden Arches’ and a 60-foot (18 m) animated neon ‘Speedee’ sign added in 1959. The restaurant is now the oldest in the chain in existence and is one of Downey’s main tourist attractions.
The First Restaurant:
The mcdonalds brothers opened their first restaurant next to the Monrovia airport in 1937. It was a small octagonal building informally called The Airdrome. That octagonal building was later moved in 1940 to 1398 North E Street in San Bernardino, California.
In 1948 they closed their restaurant for three months and reopened it in December as a hamburger stand selling burgers, chips and orange juice; the following year, French fries and Coca-Cola were added to the menu.
Menu:
This simplified menu and food preparation using assembly line principles allowed them to sell burgers for 15 cents, or about half as much as a sit-down restaurant. The restaurant was very successful and the brothers began franchising the concept in 1953.
First Franchise of Mcdonalds:
The first franchise was Occidental Petroleum director Neil Fox, who opened a restaurant at 4050 North Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona in May for a $1,000 flat fee. His restaurant was the first to use the standardized design of the McDonald’s Brothers Golden Arches, designed by Southern California architect Stanley Clark Meston and his assistant Charles Fish. Fox’s use of the ‘McDonald’s’ name apparently came as a surprise to the brothers, but all subsequent franchises used the ‘McDonald’s’ brand.
More about the Mcdonalds brothers who started it all:
Fox’s brothers-in-law and business partners, Roger Williams and Bud Landon, were the franchisees for the third McDonald’s, and used their expertise in gas station placement when choosing the Downey location. Like the other McDonald brothers franchises, they had to use Meston’s design. Ray Kroc’s purchase of the McDonald brothers’ chain did not affect the Downey restaurant, as it was franchised under an agreement with the McDonald brothers, not the McDonald’s Systems, Inc. company. of Kroc, which later became McDonald’s Corporation.
As a result, the restaurant was not subject to the modernization requirements McDonald’s Corporation imposed on its franchisees. The menu started to differ from other McDonald’s restaurants and items such as the Big Mac developed in the company were missing. Partly because of these differences, and with the opening of a McDonalds less than a mile away in the mid-1970s, the restaurant suffered poor sales and was eventually acquired by McDonald’s Corporation in 1990, when it was the only remaining McDonald’s. which was independent of the chain.
