** UPDATE ** – Someone on Facebook said that this Coffee Pot
was actually at 8601 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills.
You’ve got to love a coffee shop with a pot on its roof as tall as the café itself. This was the Wilshire Coffee Pot that stood at 4600 W. Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, and served Ben-Hur coffee. This photo was taken in 1938, by which time Ben-Hur would have been well established as a brand. (According to one post I found, the Ben-Hur brand of coffee originated as a tie-in to the popular 1925 silent movie and disappeared in the 1950s.) That streetlight out front was known as a Wilshire Special and was only to be found along Wilshire Blvd.
Frank M. says: “It’s a percolator – only way anyone ever used to make coffee at home before the 1970s.”
4600 W. Wilshire puts this location at the southwest corner of Muirfield Rd. That lot is now home to – predictably – a parking lot, but at least it’s hidden behind a row of thick, green trees. This image is from November 2023.
The address must be in error, as the street light pole is definitely the style used by Beverly Hills. The Wilshire Special in Los Angeles had the bronze nude flappers in the capital of the light fixture.