Original McDonald's Site

On the corner of 14th and E Street, a block off the old road, Richard and Maurice McDonald opened McDonald's Barbecue in 1940: carhops, a twenty-five item menu, ribs and tamales and sandwiches, the busiest teen hangout in San Bernardino. Eight years later they did the thing that mattered. In October 1948 they closed the successful drive-in, fired the carhops, threw out most of the menu, and reopened built around speed, selling hamburgers, fries, and shakes from a kitchen laid out like an assembly line. Nearly every fast-food restaurant on earth descends from that decision, made here. Ray Kroc franchised the brothers' system and eventually bought them out; the corporation now dates its own founding to a 1955 store in Illinois, and the brothers' original building was demolished in the early 1970s. The site sat unremarked, and was foreclosed on, until 1998, when Albert Okura bought it. Okura had founded the Juan Pollo rotisserie chicken chain, considered the McDonald brothers his models, and collected fast-food history the way other people collect stamps; he is the same man who later bought the whole town of Amboy to keep it from weathering away. He filled the building with menus, uniforms, packaging, and a wall of Happy Meal toys sent from around the world, and opened it free to anyone. It is emphatically unofficial, which is most of its charm. Okura died in 2023, and the museum has stayed open.