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Originally Posted by WS1911
B&M Cafeteria
Here are some photos from 1916 of the B&M Cafeteria located at 524-534 S. Hill Street, across from Central Park (Pershing Square). Looks like a great place to eat! I could not locate any information on this place. Hopefully someone can give a brief history of it.
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Thanks for this! I'm thrilled. I obsessed over this building for a while but never found such good photos of it. From what I found out, B&M was here 1910-1924 (before that, it was the Portsmouth Cafeteria, as the Portsmouth Hotel is next door). B&M company was formed in 1910 by P.P. Paulson (I love that name) and Glover E. Slith (who later had his own "Slith's" cafeterias - catchy, ain't it? - and bought the old Chocolate Shoppe at 731 S. Broadway in 1925[LA Times 6-21-1925], operating by that time as Petifits Confectionary) in a merger with Portsmouth Cafeteria. The Boos Brothers bought B&M's lease and equipment in May 1924 (LA Times 5-10-24) and announced they would build a new structure on the southern end of this property. They essentially cut the buiding in your photo building in half and the new Tudor-style Boos Cafeteria (530 S. Hill) went up where the southern half of the B&M building had been (opened 12-3-1924). The Boos building lasted into the 50s at least (can be seen in pix of Pershing Square parking excavation) but the remaining half of the old B&M structure was demolished by 1937 for parking. I hope I can post some pix - these would be details of larger photos from either LAPL or USC that I'd cropped and saved to my computer a long time ago. Thanks again for the wonderful images.
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