QSR History | 400 North Lee Street — Store Number Nine, Sold as Number One

The marker on this site was placed by McDonald's Corporation, and it calls this the ninth McDonald's in the country.

That is not how anyone else describes it.

Ray Kroc opened a McDonald's at 400 North Lee Street on 15 April 1955. He was fifty-two, he sold Multimixer milkshake machines for a living, and he did not own the name over the door.

Richard and Maurice McDonald had been running their rebuilt drive-in in San Bernardino since 1948 and licensing the design to other operators since 1953.

Kroc had gone out there to see the restaurant that kept ordering his machines, and came away as the brothers' franchising agent.

His franchising company was newly incorporated, and this store was its first — and the chain's ninth.

McDonald's has called it the Original ever since, and read carefully the claim holds: original to the corporation, not to the restaurant.

The building did not last. It was demolished in 1984, the year Kroc died.

A replica went up on the same lot in 1985, following the original blueprints, fitted out with mannequins in fifties uniforms and period kitchen equipment behind glass.

It never sold food.

The museum closed to the public in 2008, partly because the lot floods.

The signs came down in January 2018, the Speedee chef among them, and the replica was demolished later that year.

What survives is an empty lot, the marker, and a working modern McDonald's across the street with a commemorative plaque inside.

The marker's wording rewards a slow read. It dedicates the site to Kroc as "leader and friend", and in the same paragraph records that his first franchise was the chain's ninth drive-in.

Which means the photograph attached here shows a reconstruction that has itself been demolished: a replica of a 1955 building, put up in 1985, gone since 2018.

Nothing at this address is what the guidebooks still send people here to find.

Photo: Jerry Huddleston, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons