Founder Clifford E. Clinton grew up working in his father’s Clinton Cafeteria chain in San Francisco. He came to Los Angeles in 1931 to start his own business, merging his first and last names into “Clifton’s.”

He opened the original Clifton’s Cafeteria (later remodeled into Pacific Seas) on Olive Street, across from the Oviatt Building. As a boy, Clifford had lived in China with his parents during their missionary service in the Salvation Army. The region’s severe poverty and lack of food sparked his lifelong efforts to help the hungry.

Clifford’s cafeteria embodied his ideals, with mottos such as “Pay What You Wish” and “Dine Free Unless Delighted.” With the nation in the throes of the Great Depression, Clinton nearly went bankrupt honoring his principle of never turning away the hungry, even if they couldn’t pay. Yet he persevered and opened his second location, Clifton’s Brookdale, in 1935.

The building at 648 South Broadway was constructed in 1904 and is now one of the oldest buildings remaining on Broadway. It was designed by Robert Brown Young, one of Los Angeles’ most prominent early architects.

The building’s simplified Beaux Arts façade featured expansive display windows to showcase the wares of the original tenants, the J. B. Brown Music Company and Lyon McKinney Smith Company, purveyor of furniture and carpets.

A Boos Brothers cafeteria opened on the site in 1913, operating until Clinton purchased the lease in 1935. Clifford transformed the former Boos Brothers space into a fantasy forest inspired by the Santa Cruz mountains where he’d spent childhood summers, not far from the famous Brookdale Lodge.

Clinton retained the noted architecture firm of Plummer, Wurdeman, and Becket, who designed the iconic Pan-Pacific Auditorium that same year. They redesigned the building’s entire façade, with the lower portion evoking a rustic lodge, and turned the interior into the mountain setting that has greeted Clifton’s patrons for generations.