The nearly century-old location of the former Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café has defeated the odds and is still standing at 17575 Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, surrounded by homes reduced to ash, according to landlord Robert Hayman, founder and CEO of Vibe Office Properties.
“We were up last night in agony,” Hayman said. “We didn’t know if it was going to survive.”
Vibe purchased the 15,600-square-foot three-story former shopping center in 2015 for $6 million and got to work restoring and rebranding it as Vibe Surfside. The property reopened in 2019 as an office building targeting creative tenants.
The property is known informally as the Thelma Todd building.
Actress and Hollywood socialite Thelma Todd, who appeared in silent films and later acted alongside Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers in slapstick comedies, purchased the beachfront property with director Roland West in 1934 and opened a restaurant on the ground floor, just a year before her death at the age of 29.
Todd’s Sidewalk Café, along with the former Joya’s Nightclub on the second floor, were both hangouts for Hollywood elite of the late 1920s and 1930s. They anchored the recently developed Castellammare subdivision in the hills of the Pacific Palisades above. Its winding roads and staircases were designed to resemble Italy’s Amalfi Coast.
Now, much of the neighborhood is destroyed. The boutique office building across PCH from Will Rogers State Beach is one of the few structures still standing two days after the Palisades Fire erupted Tuesday. The wildfire consumed more than 17,000 acres and was 0 percent contained Thursday, according to Cal Fire.
“The houses on the hill to the right look like they’re gone. Across the street from them — also gone,” Hayman said. “The beach was on fire, the lifeguard shacks, palm trees. This whole thing is a catastrophe.”
Vibe took measures to reduce the property’s fire risk during the renovation. The firm installed a fire control system to manage the circuitry and added battery backup. It also sealed up the building’s roof vents — a common feature in Spanish Colonial architecture — to protect it from falling embers.
“If you drive towards Malibu there are a lot of retail buildings that are just gone, some also historic,” Hayman said. “We feel very, very, very lucky.”