Historic Taco Bell in Lafayette, California, closes, leaving only 6 Mission-style franchises

Meanwhile, the oldest surviving location will celebrate its 60th anniversary later this month.

The Taco Bell in Lafayette, California, has closed, and the windows were already covered on Wednesday. (Courtesy: Michael J. Berne/MJB Consulting)

One of the few remaining historic Mission-style buildings still operating as a Taco Bell has closed, depriving the chain of another link to the architectural style that defined its earliest decades.

The Taco Bell at 3501 Mt. Diablo Blvd. in Lafayette, California, closed on Tuesday, Jan. 13. The Bay Area restaurant appears to have opened in 1968, six years after Glen Bell, the “Bell” in Taco Bell, opened the very first one in Downey, California. The Lafayette store opened during a period of rapid expansion for the chain.

The Lafayette Taco Bell dates to about 1968. (Michael J. Berne/MJB Consulting)

The closing of the Lafayette restaurant leaves only one more Taco Bell in the Bay Area operating in its original Mission building, the franchise at 700 Military West in Benicia. That store dates to the mid-1980s, when modified Mission-style restaurants were still being built.

My friend Michael J. Berne, the president of MJB Consulting, a bicoastal retail planning and real estate consultancy based in Berkeley, kindly took these photos for me on Wednesday.

The closure of the Lafayette store comes less than a year after another Mission-style Taco Bell, this one in Scottsdale, Arizona, closed.

Remarkably, the Lafayette store’s patio still bears the scar of a removed firepit, an original decorative feature of Taco Bells. See the photo below.

You can see traces of where the iconic firepit was once located outside the Lafayette, California, Taco Bell. (Michael J. Berne/MJB Consulting)

Finding a Taco Bell franchise still in its original building is very hard now, with only six such stores believed to exist.

The oldest operating Taco Bell in its original structure is the store at 821 N. Milpas St. in Santa Barbara, California. This store opened in 1966 and retains its original design but did not achieve landmark status last year because the building had been expanded. This required adding a fourth arched window and compromised the classic look.

After the Santa Barbara location, we have the following old-school Taco Bell franchises still operating out of their original structures:

• 5980 Hollister Ave., Goleta, California (1966) [MAP] (This is one town over from Santa Barbara.)

  

  The Taco Bell in Goleta, California (Rolando Pujol/2021)

• 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] (This one has a mansard roof but mission detailing, too.)

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

This information is based on the subreddit FormerTacoBells, which lists the vintage stores still in service.

KTVU Fox 2 cited my work on Taco Bell in their article on the closure of the Lafayette Taco Bell. The article also linked to a Lafayette Historical Society item celebrating the quirky history of this Taco Bell.

John Kennett shared the story of a famous heist (or heists) of the bell at the Lafayette store. Local high school students (surprise!) were believed to be the culprits.

Wrote Kennett:

As the story goes, they managed to loosen the bolts—but the bell was heavier than expected. One version claims it crashed to the ground with a terrible clang. Another says they got it into the truck but panicked when a cop drove by and abandoned it in the bushes.

One way or another—and there are plenty of stories—the bell disappeared shortly after, and the legend was born.

But the pranksters weren’t done. A new bell got hoisted a few more times before Taco Bell finally bricked up the niche just to keep it from happening again. For a while, spares were kept in the back—three or four extras, depending on who you ask. But when those started vanishing before they were even mounted, well… the era of real bells quietly came to an end.

Today, the original bell is long gone, replaced by a plastic, illuminated version. Sleek. Safe. Unstealable. But ask anyone who grew up in Lafayette back then, and they’ll tell you: once upon a time, a few daring Dons pulled off the Great Taco Bell Bell Heist.

The Santa Barbara Taco Bell is the last location to feature an actual (replacement) bell, and the Goleta store has a stylized bell silhouette.

The Santa Barbara franchise is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary. It 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.

Another classic 1966 Taco Bell, which opened shortly after the Santa Barbara store, closed last April. This Taco Bell was at 7847 E. McDowell Road in Scottsdale, Arizona. That franchise did not go out of business but moved to a new building down the road.

Many vintage Taco Bells carry on, repurposed for new uses. Below is a very fine example in Ventura, California.

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)

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.

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.