Today’s Coastal Kitchen Restaurant
You are standing in front of one of the oldest buildings in Dana Point that was built in 1927 by early developer Anna G. Walters. She called it the Blue Lantern Fountain Lunch where you could buy gas and food. The old photo shows the open porch-like bay that is now filled in and the corner door entrance to the lunchroom. An old-time resident talked about working here as a young man in the 1930s when one or two cars an hour would come by.
Across the street is a later building that was a drive-in restaurant where the waiters and waitresses came out to your car to take the order, then bring the food out on a tray that would be hooked over the window opening of your car door. Some of the help for the restaurant lived in the small building that you can see up behind. Anna Walters and Sidney Woodruff, together with other investors, are credited with creating the nautical theme for Dana Point and naming the streets after ship lanterns of different colors. The streetlights were ships’ lanterns and, at the end of each street, one colored lantern globe matched the color of the street name, and the streets were landscaped with flowers in the same color. The lantern globe here on Blue Lantern would have been blue, as he replicated now, on Amber Lantern it was Amber, on Ruby Lantern, red, and so forth.
