The Globe and Mail

Did Toronto boogie to the Googie beat? "Googie" is not a term heard very often in the city's architectural circles. Named after a popular Los Angeles coffee-shop chain, the Googie style of architecture encompassed all that was garish, fun, casual and optimistic about the immediate post-war years, but above all it was a style built for speed. New expressways and faster cars meant retailers could no longer hang a small shingle above their doors as had been done in the leisurely Model-T days. Instead, businesses in new strip malls had to increase the scale of their buildings and, in effect, become their own billboards, or they'd get lost in the mix as people whizzed past.