McDonald's opened the restaurant whose building first featured its famous Golden Arches in 1953.
The restaurant was built in Downey, California, and was operated by Roger Williams and Burdette Landon, early McDonald's franchisees. Its design used two large yellow arches as prominent architectural elements, making the building visible to passing motorists.
This location is historically important because the arches originally functioned as architecture, not merely as a printed logo. McDonald's later transformed the paired arches into a simpler corporate mark, allowing the shape to represent the company even when no restaurant building was visible.
People often place the arches' origin in 1962 because that was the year the modern logo was developed. The physical arches, however, appeared on a McDonald's restaurant years earlier.