The Street That Forgot What It Was For

You take a left out your front door and head down to the avenue. The laundromat is on the corner. The tailor is two doors down. There’s a corner grocer where someone is pulling bread out of the oven — you can smell it from the sidewalk. You stop for a coffee. You run into five neighbors and a cat that belongs to no one and everyone. You’re home in 40 minutes with everything you need for the week and you never once got in a car.

This was Las Tunas Drive. And it was real.

Then something changed. Not all at once but over decades, and mostly without anyone asking the people who lived here what they thought about it.

I grew up in San Gabriel, California, a city 10 miles northeast of Los Angeles that likes to call itself the birthplace of the Los Angeles region. Las Tunas Drive runs through its heart, and for most of the 20th century it ran through the daily lives of everyone who lived within a few blocks of it. You didn’t go to Las Tunas to shop. You went because that’s where things were — where life happened to be located, conveniently, at the scale of a walk.

There was Goody’s Restaurant at 865 East Las Tunas, established 1957, known for its pancakes and pies and the unhurried atmosphere of a place that understood it wasn’t going anywhere. There was the Moran Meat Company at 1145 East Las Tunas, a family butcher founded in the 1930s — Ray and Ron Moran behind the counter, their father’s name on the sign. There was Mission Super Hardware, founded in 1947 by Joe and Mike Falabrino, a family operation that expanded block by block over decades. There was Tony’s Shoe Repair, still at 310 East Las Tunas today, doing shoes and zippers and alterations with the same unhurried competence it always has. And just north, on San Marino Avenue, there was an Alta Dena dairy drive-through — part of a network of neighborhood-scale dairy stores that once dotted Los Angeles County, where you could pull up in your car or walk over with a wagon and leave with milk, butter, eggs, and change left over from a dollar.

And then there was the Stuffed Sandwich. You could walk there as a kid, which I did. It was the kind of place that knew your order and didn’t need to ask.

On and around that corridor — within walking distance of any house on San Marino Avenue or one street in either direction — you had food, hardware, meat, shoes, alterations, dairy, a sit-down meal, a sandwich. The full apparatus of daily life, distributed across a few blocks, priced for working people, owned by families who lived nearby.

What happened to Las Tunas Drive has a name: post-war exclusionary zoning. It’s the same story playing out on main streets across North America, with local variations in timing and detail but a shared underlying cause.

In the decades following World War II, American cities made a series of decisions — about zoning, about roads, about what kinds of buildings could go where and what kinds of commerce could exist near homes — that systematically dismantled the neighborhood-scale economy. Uses were separated. Residential here, commercial there. The corner store became a zoning violation. The small grocer couldn’t compete with the supermarket two miles away that had a parking lot the size of a city block. The dairy closed — not just because of one thing but because of a cascade: regulatory pressure, corporate acquisition, bankruptcy, and then the quiet conversion of storefronts into gyms and nail salons and parking lots, one by one, across a decade.

The Moran Meat Company closed in the 1990s. The Stuffed Sandwich — priced out of its original Las Tunas location by rising rents — moved into the old Moran building, a displaced business taking up residence in a vacancy left by another. Then it closed too.

Goody’s Restaurant held on until 2010. Fifty-three years of pancakes, then nothing.

The Alta Dena dairy network, which once had over 80 associated drive-throughs across Los Angeles County, unraveled through the 1980s and 1990s as the founding family lost the company to corporate sale, bankruptcy, and regulatory battles. What replaced those neighborhood storefronts? In most cases, something that required a car to reach, served a larger geographic area, and cost more — because the economics of scale that make big-box retail possible are the same economics that make neighborhood-scale retail impossible.

This is the part that gets missed in conversations about urban planning and walkability. We talk about what we want to build. We rarely talk about what we already destroyed, and how systematically we destroyed it, and who bore the cost when it was gone.

Not everyone could absorb that cost equally.

The elderly neighbor who walked to Goody’s every Saturday morning for fifty years didn’t stop wanting pancakes when Goody’s closed. She just stopped being able to get them without asking someone for a ride. The family without a second car that used to walk to the corner for milk now plans a grocery trip instead — a trip that costs time, gas, and often more money, because neighborhood-scale stores that own their supply chain price differently than supermarkets that don’t. The person using a wheelchair navigating a street designed for cars rather than people, trying to reach a pharmacy that moved from two blocks away to two miles away when the corner building got converted to a yoga studio.

None of these are dramatic losses. That’s what makes them so effective at being ignored. They are the kind of losses that accumulate quietly, that show up in who can move through a neighborhood independently and who can’t, in who spends an hour on an errand that used to take ten minutes, in who gets left behind when the assumption that everyone drives becomes the foundation of every planning decision.

Walking Las Tunas today, you’ll find a 7-Eleven where the corner grocer used to be. The street is full — restaurants, pastry shops, salons, tea shops. But full and functional are not the same thing. You cannot buy produce. You cannot drop off a piece of clothing to be hemmed.

Tony’s Shoe Repair is still at 310 E. Las Tunas. So is Mission Hardware — Falabrino’s, now affiliated with Ace, still family-connected, still on the same block it has occupied since 1947. These survivors are not accidents. They are businesses that managed to hold on through a combination of low overhead, owned buildings, loyal customers, and the kind of irreplaceable craft that can’t be shipped from a warehouse. You can’t mail your shoes to Amazon.

But they are exceptions, and they know it. The street around them is a record of everything that couldn’t hold on.

The question worth asking — the one that deserves a local answer here in San Gabriel — is not how we get back to the 1960s. We don’t. The question is: what do we do with the vacancies? When a building that housed a butcher for 60 years sits empty, or gets converted to a use that serves people arriving by car from three cities away, what does the zoning code allow? What does it encourage? And who gets to decide?

Because the decisions that emptied Las Tunas Drive were made at the level of policy — zoning boards, city councils, planning commissions, federal highway allocations — and they can be revisited the same way. San Gabriel’s Planning Commission has been doing exactly this, amending the C-1 and C-3 zones that cover Las Tunas Drive as recently as 2023 and 2025, under pressure from the state to comply with housing law. Those amendments now allow mixed-use development along the corridor (residential above ground-floor commercial) which is a meaningful step. But the reforms have been driven by the housing crisis, not by the question of what the ground floor is for. The ground floor, where the butcher used to be, where a family once stopped on the way home with a list that fit in a pocket, is still subject to the same use classifications and parking requirements that made neighborhood-scale retail unviable in the first place. California banned parking minimums near transit in 2023, and Las Tunas Drive has bus service. Whether San Gabriel has updated its local code to reflect that is a question worth putting directly to the planning department.

The buildings are still there too. That’s the part that matters. The storefronts that housed Moran Meat and the Stuffed Sandwich and the corner grocer didn’t disappear:, they got repurposed. Converted to uses that require a car to reach, or that serve a regional customer rather than the person living half a block away. The physical infrastructure of neighborhood commerce survived. What changed was what we decided to put inside it, and who we decided it was for.

That’s a zoning decision. It’s a parking requirement. It’s a use classification, reviewed and reaffirmed or quietly left unchanged at Planning Commission meetings that most residents never attend. The good news is that San Gabriel’s planners are already in the habit of amending the zoning code — they’ve done it repeatedly in recent years. The question is whether the next round of amendments asks not just where housing goes, but what happens at street level. Whether the building that once housed a butcher gets filled with something the surrounding neighborhood can actually use, or something it has to drive to reach. That choice is available. It’s sitting in the agenda packet of the next Planning Commission meeting.

The people who live within walking distance of Las Tunas Drive deserve a street that works for them. That’s not a matter of nostalgia. It’s a matter of what gets decided next. None of this is radical. It’s what Las Tunas Drive used to be.