Phoenix hosted the first McDonald’s restaurant to use the famous Golden Arches design.
Architect Stanley Clark Meston designed the arches for a McDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1952. The structure used large yellow arches at the sides of the building, making the restaurant highly visible from the road and giving the architecture a distinctive visual identity.
The arches were initially part of the restaurant building rather than the standalone logo commonly recognized today. In 1962, Jim Schindler adapted the two arches into the stylized “M” mark that became McDonald’s corporate logo.
Phoenix is sometimes confused with San Bernardino, where the McDonald brothers operated their original restaurant, or Des Plaines, where a later reconstruction of an early McDonald’s restaurant is located. Those places are important to company history, but Phoenix is the city connected with the first Golden Arches building design.