American Pie 2 | 402 South Myrtle Avenue, Monrovia — The Dog Years Corner

Dog Years, the diner where the plan gets made in the first film and where the gang keeps returning in the second, was never a diner. It was an empty storefront on South Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia that a set dresser filled with booths, signage and a counter for the length of a shoot, then emptied again. The exterior in American Pie 2 is this address: 402 South Myrtle.

The building went back to being a building. It has traded as a café and, more recently, as a bar and kitchen, and the plate glass the crew shot through is still the plate glass. Nothing marks it. There is no plaque, no framed still by the door, and the staff will not necessarily know.

Myrtle Avenue earns the attention anyway. Monrovia was laid out in 1886 as a hundred-and-twenty-acre townsite centred on this street and Colorado Boulevard, and the old commercial spine survived the century better than most in the San Gabriel Valley — brick fronts, transom windows, awnings at a human height. Film crews have used it constantly for exactly that reason. The house from the 1986 horror comedy House is four streets away on Melrose Avenue.

Order something at 402 and sit at the window. The frame the camera used is the one you are looking out of, and the street outside is doing what it did in 1999: almost nothing, pleasantly.