1966 Taco Bell, a rare 'mission' building, to close in Scottsdale as historic status is denied to another classic in Santa Barbara

The mission-style buildings doing business as Taco Bells are now down to 7. (I have a list.) Many former locations survive, a feast for Americana archaeologists.

The Taco Bell in Santa Barbara has one arch too many, far right, at least to claim historic status. (Rolando Pujol/2021)

It’s the Taco Bell of your vintage dreams, and at age 59, it appears to be the oldest franchise of the Mexican food chain that is still operating out of its original mission-style building. It opened just under four years after the chain was founded by Glen Bell, the “Bell” in Taco Bell.

This historic Taco Bell, at 821 N. Milpas St. in Santa Barbara, California, failed to gain “historic status” last month. And now, a second mission-style Taco Bell, built later that same year in Scottsdale, Arizona, is days away from being decommissioned, diminishing the number of original mission buildings still doing business as Taco Bells to just seven from what was once thousands.

More on all that later.

Let’s begin with the Santa Barbara Taco Bell, which opened in grand style in a pachanga spread over two days in 1966, Friday, Jan. 28, and Saturday, Jan. 29. Adding to the merriment was the music of a mariachi band and the balloon-inflating antics of a clown called Jingles. Customers went home with free beach hats, and you didn’t need to know the address to find the Taco Bell —all you had to do was look for the searchlight, according to an advertisement published in the Santa Barbara News-Press on opening day.

The store represented the American dream for John K. Bishop, who had worked as a school teacher before entering the restaurant business by opening the Santa Barbara Taco Bell after reaching out to Glen Bell himself. A mere six months later, Taco Bell corporate, in an advertisement seeking to attract new franchisees, hailed the 26-year-old Bishop as having displayed “exceptional management ability in his Taco Bell business.” That much is evident today — the business is still there, right down to the physical building, a rare and impressive legacy for Bishop, who left the company in the late 1980s and died in 1999, according to his daughter.

She explains here that her dad would go on to open more Taco Bells, as far away as Bakersfield — 12 in all, she detailed in her book — and he became a multi-millionaire, with Mercedes-Benzes, along with a Rolls-Royce and a Jaguar as part of the vehicular fleet of the Bishop family, who lived in an antiques-filled Montecito manse.

She writes about her dad’s approach to the food:

I remember hearing my dad instruct his employees to Flip, whip, stir, the meat, beans and sauces. It was a phrase that was drilled into the employees to make sure that the food was the very best it could be. At the time, everything was made fresh in the kitchens of our Taco Bells. Blocks of cheese were grated fresh daily. The sauces were made from scratch and the meat cooked and seasoned to perfection. The food was amazing. It was one of the reasons that year after year, my dad’s franchises were praised by the corporate offices and his bank accounts flush with cash.

At some point in the Santa Barbara Taco Bell’s history, the store was subtly but fatefully updated. I hadn’t even noticed that this Taco Bell is a little different from other Taco Bells of that early vintage, but little things mean a lot in this case. The original structure had three arches, which were initially open to the air in the early Taco Bells. This location, however, now has four arches, the additional one constructed to accommodate an expanded dining room.

That modification was one arch too many for Santa Barbara’s Historic Landmarks Commission, which voted 8-0 against deeming the building “a structure of merit.”

According to Joshua Molina on Noozhawk.com:

“It doesn’t retain its iconic street facade,” said Tim Hazeltine, senior partner for Post/Hazeltine, which did a historic resources report on the building ….

“It is one of the few remaining examples of programmatic architecture,” he said. “What that means is that the architecture expresses something about the product that is being sold in the building.”

Hazeltine said the design “sort of evokes a Zorro, this is what a Spanish building would look like,” feel.

Board members, the publication reported, were moved by the building and its history, with one official, Michael Drury, asking Hazeltine if he turned up photos of him and his family dining there on Friday nights back in the day.

The construction of that fourth arch for the dining-room expansion was the death blow to a historic designation.

“All of us can sit here and remember going to places like this,” Commissioner Dennis Doordan said, according to Noozhawk. “Nostalgia is different than historical significance. Nostalgia, in my opinion, is not a reason to preserve.”

This news comes as another classic 1966 Taco Bell, which opened shortly after the Santa Barbara store, is set to close on Saturday, April 12. This Taco Bell, at 7847 E. McDowell Road in Scottsdale, Arizona, has been on my shoot list for many years, and I somehow missed it on my last trip out there last November. (It was a very frenzied trip photographing for my book, so I somehow overlooked this store even though it was burning a hole in my itinerary.) This franchise is not going out of business but simply moving to a new building down the road.

This Taco Bell was opened by Jack Latham, who was also featured in the same Taco Bell ad that mentioned the Santa Barbara store that Bishop founded. The ad said Latham was “retiring” from a career as a paper-products executive to run the Scottsdale Taco Bell, seen recently below.

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Mouth by Southwest reports the future of the original building is unclear, even as the new one is ready for business. The new restaurant has much more seating inside — the old building has just three tables indoors — a larger kitchen, and an improved drive-thru, which Fox 10 presented as likely factors in the former location’s closure.

Many vintage Taco Bells carry on, repurposed for new uses. Below is a very fine example in Ventura, California, so I can only hope this one in Scottsdale will, at the very least, be repurposed. (It could make a great little museum.)

This former Taco Bell in Ventura, California, is well-preserved and is now doing business as Corrales Mexican Food. Map it here. Below is an intact firepit at the Ventura restaurant, which was an early Taco Bell signature feature. (Rolando Pujol/2024)

As for the location in Santa Barbara, there is no reason to think the building is in imminent danger, but it doesn’t have the municipal security blanket that it could have, alas, which is a shame.

If I ever find myself on a landmarking board, I would push to loosen the standards. It’s not just about earnest fidelity to the original design that makes a building worthy of landmark designation. In this case, the overall effect of this restaurant still preserves the general look and feel of those early Taco Bells, making it a critical surviving (and forever unofficial, it seems) landmark, sitting at the rich intersection of American entrepreneurship, dining habits, and popular culture of America at midcentury. And it’s the oldest original building that remains a Taco Bell — quite significant.

Another vintage Taco Bell in Goleta, an outline of a bell housed in the arch. (Rolando Pujol/2021)

The Santa Barbara area is a fast-food reliquary. Another Taco Bell of similar vintage survives in nearby Goleta, above, next door to a mansard McDonald’s, below, which has a transitional late 1960s sign.

The McDonald’s in Goleta features a rare sign seen briefly in the late 1960s, and a shingled mansard roof. The birthplace of the Egg McMuffin, below, is a mansard-McBox hybrid. (Rolando Pujol/2021)

There’s also the McDonald’s in Santa Barbara, above, where Herb Peterson invented the Egg McMuffin, and this deliciously vintage Jack in the Box, below.

This vintage Jack in the Box in Santa Barbara has a tiny dining area. (Rolando Pujol/2021)

Fast-food architecture is not why most people visit Santa Barbara. Still, if you’ve read this far, the Taco Bell might end up a few notches below Old Mission Santa Barbara itself on your itinerary.

As for how many original Taco Bells are left still running out of their original building, the list keeps shrinking.

A list maintained on Reddit, on the subreddit FormerTacoBells, listed the following stores, which are also posted below. (I’ve included map locations.) The closure of the Scottsdale store will leave us, according to this accounting, with just seven mission buildings operating as Taco Bells.

A Jan. 13, 1967, ad for the opening of the Taco Bell in Long Beach, California. The ad was published in the Independent and accessed on newspapers.com. Note the Taco Bell Boy: Roadarch.com reports a statue of this boy can be seen in Kingman, Arizona, in the offices of Desert De Oro Foods.

• 821 N. Milpas St., Santa Barbara, California (Jan. 28, 1966) [MAP]

• 5980 Hollister Ave., Goleta, California (1966) [MAP]

• 3125 E. Broadway, Long Beach, California (Jan. 14, 1967) [MAP]

• 405 E. Platte Ave., Colorado Springs, Colorado (1979, according to subreddit FormerTacoBells) [MAP]

• 2902 N. Main St., Durango, Colorado (1982, according to subreddit FormerTacoBells) [MAP]

• 700 Military West, Benicia, California (1984/1985, per subreddit) [MAP]

• 3501 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette, California (advertised as “coming soon” in June 1968) [MAP]

Note: Until recently, there was a mission model in Honolulu, Hawaii, that opened in April 1976 and was the first Taco Bell in that state. A recent renovation knocks it off the list, but elements of the original survive, as you can see in this Reddit post. [MAP]

An excellent resource for the status of vintage Taco Bells (and so much more roadside Americana) can be found at Debra Jane Seltzer’s roadarch.com. Here is her Taco Bell resource page. She notes that the bell in the Santa Barbara location is a replica that was installed around 2019.

To learn more about the evolution of Taco Bell’s design, check out my Retrologist entry here, with photos from my travels over the years.

My new book, “The Great American Retro Road Trip,” featured Taco Bell coverage and a good deal more about classic American fast-food chains. Please preorder it now! It hits bookstores everywhere on June 24.