Tiki Garage in San Diego?

I rode the 5 bus downtown from University City on Friday while on my way to watch the Padres lose, and I noticed an Auto Repair place on the NE corner of Morena Blvd & Buenos Ave with a conical roof topped by a good sized Tiki. Not having gone down this stretch of Morena I've been unaware of ant Tiki establishments in the area, does anyone know the provinence of this place? I've found Solai Bamboo on Morena & the old Mission Bay Inn used to be near Morena, but I haven't seen anyone else mention this place.

...there are some fairly large tikis several blocks down from ingraham on pb drive... in front of some condos or apts... don't know if these are new, even though travels through there are frequent, never recalled seeing them before...

Freddie,
That building houses Mission Bay Automotive. We have our cars serviced there. Cool guys but they don't know the story behind the building. I'll see if they found anything out since our last visit when I take my car for it's next service.

"a conical roof topped by a good sized Tiki"...Any chance of getting a picture of this? It sounds pretty @$%^& cool.

I had heard that it was an actual car dealership at one time. I would love to get some history on it.

I was riding the bus & I didn't have my camera with me, I'll try to go down & take some pictures this weekend.

Look at this Google Sattelite image & zoom all the way in, the building is directly East of the marker and you can see the shadow that the roof casts. Looking at this I can imagine I see the shadow cast by the Tiki, but I'm certain it's just my imagination.

San Diego is now on Google Street View!

Here's the Tiki on top of Mission Bay Automotive:

Do any of the new TCers know its provenance?

Somewhere on TC there is an old thread about this place.

Buzzy Out!

This was covered on a previous post which I can't locate, here's my text, we'll be coving this at Oasis;

Mission bay auto

When I first found this place I was quite excited as I suspected that this may have once been a Tiki gas station or at least a Tiki repair shop. I had hoped to get proof of that for the (then) upcoming BOT, unfortunately all my leads slowly petered out. The mechanics I spoke with there (over 10 years ago) thought I was crazy. But after talking for a while, the head guy he said the Tiki was put up there for “luck” and it had always been a car shop. My brother happened to know a guy who knew a guy who knew the former owner. Before we were able to pursue this long avenue, Sven’s book finally went to the publisher and I put this place in the back of my head. The location of the establishment is important as this was a main road into town before freeway 5 was put in. If you look at the structure it (to me) resembles an old style filling station (with a lot of additions) of course now there are no pumps left but I still believe this was a gas station way back when. Also if you go north just a block or so you’ll hit the cool rattan/patio shop, its architecture is clearly mid-century exotic. If you look closely they both have a similar border treatment, obviously one borrowed the idea from the other, either way they were trying to capitalize on the popularity of Polynesian pop.

My very best alohas,

Bosko

Sorry, I meant to say we will be covering this among other locations at my San Diego Tiki Talk (Sunday 11:00 to 12:00) at this years Oasis, I hope to see everyone there and please come introduce yourselves.

Bosko

On 2007-08-07 20:35, TIKIBOSKO wrote:
This was covered on a previous post which I can't locate,

Discussed here.