Westlake Shopping Center

On your right is the Westlake Shopping Center — and if it looks unremarkable, that's exactly the point of it. When Henry Doelger built his suburb up on that hillside behind us, he built the people who'd live there a problem: they had houses, streets, schools — but no downtown. No main street to walk to. So in 1950 he broke ground right here on the answer, and by 1951 it was open. That makes this one of the very first shopping centers in the entire country — the pattern that would spread across every American suburb for the next fifty years was being worked out, in real time, on this lot.

Doelger gave the overflow San Francisco couldn't hold not just a place to sleep but a place to be — groceries, a five-and-dime, and by 1956 a JCPenney anchoring a five-million-dollar expansion. This was the town square for a town that had been assembled from a catalog.

The survivor here, the one worth knowing, is Original Joe's. It opened its Westlake location in 1956 — an offshoot of the San Francisco institution — and ran continuously right up until 2014, when it closed for a full renovation. Two years later it reopened, same family, red booths and all, and it still anchors the center today. So the suburb that critics dismissed as ticky-tacky boxes turned out to grow the ordinary machinery of a real place: a downtown, a department store, a family restaurant where three generations have marked their birthdays. Keep heading east on John Daly Boulevard — we're climbing toward the original hilltop where this whole city started, with a very different crowd than shoppers.