California crazy and beyond - Jim Heimann

Ever since the advent of the automobile, oddball roadside architecture has dotted the American landscape. Restaurants, realtors, music schools, service stations, and many other businesses operated out of buildings shaped like hot dogs, animals, airplanes, pianos, and other such anomalies. Los Angeles historian Jim Heimann dubbed this style "California Crazy," and wrote a book about it in 1980; California Crazy and Beyond is the expanded reissue of that Chronicle Books classic. The original California Crazy had a very long life - seventeen years. It established long-time author Jim Heimann's reputation as a unique architectural historian, and helped secure Chronicle's reputation as a foremost pop culture publisher. Tracing the history of roadside vernacular architecture that proliferated in California from the twenties through the forties, the book helped legitimise the kitschy phenomena of toad-shaped inns, derby-like restaurants, and giant Paul Bunyan statues. Over the years Jim Heimann has researched the subject and uncovered a multitude of new pictures and uncovered buildings he never knew existed.;With over 350 photographs and an illuminating text that takes the subject well beyond the bounds of California, California Crazy and Beyond is for the next generation of pop-architecture aficionados.