The "Mixville Market" was not in Mixville

Whole Foods will be opening in the Mixville shopping center, in the building that housed Ralphs supermarket. The area now comprised by the shopping center was once western actor Tom Mix’s movie set town called Mixville. In between the time that it was a shopping center (from the early 1960s) and the time it was Tom Mix’s Mixville (ending about 1920), the Silver Lake Auto Court, a small grocery store, for a period a tire store, and a Laundromat, possibly some other businesses, occupied the 12-acre lot. A photo of the 1933 opening of the “Mixville Market” accompanies this blog. The photograph shows an evolution in market design: this market has a parking lot. Earlier markets were designed for pedestrians. The supermarket’s origin as a produce market is evident in the display of fruits and vegetables. The Silver Lake Residents Association newsletter dated November 1989 indicates the market in the photograph that accompanies this article was on the northeast corner of Silver Lake Boulevard and Glendale Boulevard, which is at the edge of the Mixville site at one time occupied by the Silver Lake Auto Court. Several people posted on various Internet sites that they remember the Mixville Market and that it was in Mixville. One person said that his mother always said she was going to the Mixville Market but she actually went to the Hub Mart, which is now Trader Joe’s. The Los Angeles Public Library collection remarks that the photographer’s note indicated the store was on Fletcher Drive. Last time I was in Los Angeles, I saw the building in the photograph – “Mixville Market” – still stood where it had stood for 80 years. The building has not moved from the corner of Fletcher Drive and San Fernando Road. It was never in Mixville. It was on the other side of the river from what was once Mixville but by 1933 was an auto court. The photographer was right, and the Silver Lake Residents Association was wrong. It is a narrow building, built when grocery stores sold mostly produce and some canned and packaged goods. Now, with the enormous array of canned, frozen and packaged goods offered by supermarkets, this building is not an adequate size. At night, the workers in the Mixville Market closed the building with folding shutters that locked. There was, however, a small door built into the metal shutter through which agile last-minute shoppers – like my stepfather -- could exit.