Your Daily Photo (With a Name Like Zucky's, You Know It's Probably a Bank Edition)

That's Santa Monica's version of a historic building. It was a crap diner when it was a diner, then there was a suspicious fire back in the early 90s, then it sat for more than a decade, finally a bank agreed to repurpose the structure, even though they couldn't tear it down.

Preservationism can be truly idiotic sometimes. Here's a PDF of the City Landmark Assessment Report.

Weep at the idiocy, and marvel at the petty bureaucratic interference into normal commercial land use.

First Republic Bank (that's their branch at the former Zucky's) was recently sold off by Bank of America to some private investors at fire sale prices. Doesn't have much to do with anything, other than to show what a great job all that TARP money is doing.