A Night Out, Saved in a Matchbook

A hotel drawn in miniature. A nightclub’s name in sweeping script. A telephone number that preserves a different way of calling Hollywood. A matchbook has very little room to make an impression, which may explain why the good ones still do.

I have always loved bringing one home after a night out. It is such a small thing to keep, but years later it can bring back a surprisingly complete evening: where you went, who was sitting across from you, perhaps even what you ordered. The bill has long since disappeared. Somehow, the matchbook survives.

Looking through Los Angeles examples, you begin to assemble a city from names, addresses and tiny pieces of design. Hotels promise escape. Nightclubs promise an evening worth dressing for. Restaurants give their name the confidence of a signature. Some of the places are gone; others remain part of the dinner plans. The paper puts them on the same table.

A very small advertisement

A matchbook was useful before it became a keepsake. Its repeated handling gave the printed cover repeated opportunities to be seen. A name, an address and a telephone number turned an everyday object into something a customer could take away and use again.

That practical purpose explains some of the design’s pleasures. The lettering had to work at a modest scale. A building, a face or a symbol had to be simplified enough to remain recognizable. There was space for personality, but very little space to waste.

There is also information inside. An unfolded cover can reveal an address omitted from the front, another business associated with the venue or the wording of an older telephone exchange. The fold is part of the object’s design. A photograph of the front alone does not always tell the whole story.

Checking in, in miniature

The Beverly Hills Hotel opened in 1912, before Beverly Hills incorporated as a city. Its official history describes a hotel established partly to accommodate visitors considering property in the area. It is an unusually direct connection between a place to stay and the making of a neighborhood.

The matchbook brings that large history down to hand size. A hotel name on a little piece of card could accompany a guest far beyond the grounds. The object carried an association with an address, whether its owner had stayed for a week or only stopped for a drink.

That is one of the useful distinctions in looking at these things. The cover can tell us what a business wanted to communicate. It cannot, by itself, tell us who picked it up or what sort of evening they had. The personal part of the archive often disappears before the paper does.

A hat, a name, a place at the table

The Brown Derby is a reminder to look beyond a familiar name. The restaurant’s identity is strongly associated with a hat, but its history involved multiple locations. An address on a particular cover matters. A matchbook from Hollywood should not be assigned to the original hat-shaped restaurant simply because the name is the same.

Even without settling the precise printing date of every example, there is much to see. The balance of lettering and image, the use of the cover’s narrow proportions and the promise of an identifiable place are all there in the object. The design is trying to make a very small surface stand for a much larger experience.

At Musso & Frank, whose history on Hollywood Boulevard reaches back to 1919, that connection between name and place remains unusually strong. The matchcover reads as an extension of the restaurant’s identity, familiar enough that relatively little explanation is necessary.

There is a pleasure in seeing a surviving institution represented by something older and more fragile than its reputation. A small printed object does not have to be especially rare to make the passage of time tangible. Sometimes an old telephone number will do it.

After dark on the Strip

Ciro’s belonged to the Sunset Strip’s nightclub world of the 1940s and 1950s. Its address later acquired a quite different reputation: the Comedy Store opened there in 1972, founded by Sammy Shore, Mitzi Shore and Rudy DeLuca. The club’s own history follows that passage from Hollywood dinner-and-show society to a room identified with stand-up comedy.

The matchbook is particularly well suited to nightlife history because it sits between promotion and memory. The business supplied an image of itself; the customer supplied the occasion. A pristine collector’s example preserves the first. A battered one found in a drawer may have preserved both.

The Cocoanut Grove cover makes the relationship between a room and its host hotel especially visible. The nightclub and the Ambassador belonged to the same social geography, but a matchbook could foreground whichever name held the greater appeal for the person carrying it.

The Ambassador opened in 1921 to a design by Myron Hunt, and Paul R. Williams later contributed alterations. The hotel hosted six Academy Award ceremonies and became one of Wilshire Boulevard’s defining addresses. Its demolition in 2005, after a long preservation fight, gives the little cover a different weight. The Conservancy’s record preserves the larger architectural story; the matchbook preserves something a diner could carry home.

The restaurant as a signature

Chasen’s is represented here by red and cream covers whose narrow format gives the lettering room to stretch. The restaurant’s address and old telephone exchange sit beneath the signature. Even without a dining room in view, there is plenty to recognize.

Dave Chasen opened his restaurant in 1936, and the original dining operation continued until 1995. Chili and barbecue were part of its beginnings, long before its booths became a fixture of Hollywood dining. When furnishings and memorabilia went to auction in 1999, people could bid on much grander souvenirs than a matchbook. The appeal was related: taking a small part of a familiar place home after the place itself had changed.

Spago’s matchbook belongs to a later chapter of Los Angeles restaurant culture. Wolfgang Puck opened the original on the Sunset Strip in 1982; the Beverly Hills restaurant followed in 1997. His official biography traces that change of address. It is a useful reminder of how much information a few lines of small print can hold.

A name may continue while its setting changes. A matchbook carrying the earlier address records one particular version of the restaurant, rather than standing in for every version that followed. That specificity is what makes these little things valuable as evidence.

A city of borrowed atmospheres

Don the Beachcomber’s cover belongs to the elaborate fantasy world marketed by American tropical-themed bars and restaurants. The imagery is worth looking at as an advertisement, with its own constructed idea of escape. It should not be mistaken for a documentary account of the cultures it borrows from.

That distinction makes the design more interesting to examine. What did an evening out promise? How much of that promise could a few colors, a name and a small illustration convey? The matchbook gives us a compact answer from the business itself.

The Formosa Cafe example is especially generous with visual information. The paired red and black covers make room for an illustration, an address and the promise of cocktails, lunch and dinner. The restaurant’s restored rooms offer a useful parallel: the details become more legible when someone has taken the trouble to keep them together.

The Los Angeles Conservancy documents the Formosa’s rehabilitation by the 1933 Group and its reopening in June 2019. That is a substantial preservation story. The matchbook is a smaller survival, but it belongs beside the larger one. Buildings and the objects associated with them can tell overlapping versions of a place’s life.

Dinner, then and now

Taix’s family history begins with a restaurant opened in downtown Los Angeles in 1927, followed by its Sunset Boulevard location in 1962. The restaurant’s account describes the original family-style meals and the generations involved in the business. A matchbook carrying the name enters that longer story at the scale of a single visit.

It also broadens the collection beyond an exclusively glamorous idea of Los Angeles. People keep things from places where they feel comfortable, from family occasions and familiar meals as well as from evenings they consider exceptional. The value of a souvenir is not always proportional to the difficulty of getting a reservation.

What to look for in your own drawer

If you have a few old matchbooks, start by photographing the complete cover and any printing inside. Keep the address with the image. Record what you actually know about how the object came to you, separately from what you suspect about its age. A note from the person who brought it home can be more useful than a confident date supplied years later.

A restaurant’s opening date is not the date every piece of its stationery was printed. The Beverly Hills Hotel examples at the top of this feature advertise the Palm Terrace and Polo Lounge, while the Brown Derby covers distinguish among the restaurant’s branches. Those details give the objects a more particular history than a name alone. A printed address or telephone exchange can help narrow a date, but it is worth resisting the temptation to assign an exact year without evidence.

For more of the city behind these addresses, explore our Los Angeles walking tours or our feature on the MacArthur’s changing social worlds. Restaurants, clubs and hotels help explain how neighborhoods were used, as well as how they looked.

And if you still have a matchbook from a favorite Los Angeles night out, tell us where it came from. I would be just as interested in the evening as in the object.

The best souvenirs tend to be very small. The stories they keep are another matter.