Dale's Donuts big donut

Above a Compton doughnut shop sits a concrete doughnut about 32 feet across. The Compton Chamber of Commerce wrote in September 2026 that Dale’s Donuts, at Atlantic Avenue and Alondra Boulevard, is crowned by a rooftop doughnut dating to the 1950s and is one of five surviving former Big Do-Nut Drive-In locations. The chamber notes the corner is near the boundary between the City of Compton and unincorporated East Rancho Dominguez, and that the business has a Compton mailing address.

The chain began with Russell C. Wendell, a doughnut-machine salesman. According to the chamber, the first shop opened in Westmont in the early 1950s and Wendell eventually developed about 10 locations before selling them in the 1970s. The chamber says architect Henry J. Goodwin designed the buildings, and structural engineer Richard Bradshaw developed the method for the rooftop rings: rolled steel bars for the frame, covered with concrete applied under pressure. The original doughnuts, it says, reportedly weighed about 15,000 pounds. The Los Angeles Conservancy, writing about the Randy’s Donuts site in Inglewood, says Bradshaw, who worked on the Theme Building at LAX, is “said to have designed” these doughnuts out of rolled steel bars covered with gunite.