Clifton’s, the downtown Los Angeles cafeteria where a young Ray Bradbury ate cheap dinners and the city’s science-fiction fans held their meetings, has quietly reopened under a new name. It is now Sanctuary, and its new operators want to turn it into a never-ending live-action role-playing game. Somewhere, Forrest J Ackerman is reaching for his costume.
According to the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story on 6 November, the building at 648 South Broadway is being run by Neil Biondich and Alex McCullough of Sanctuary DTLA. Their inspiration is Meow Wolf, the American chain of immersive art spaces, but with a more linear story and a game at its heart. The plan is what Biondich describes as a never-ending “Dungeons & Dragons”-inspired game running every day. There will also be an augmented-reality app, and quests will reward players with discounted food and drink. It is the first role-playing game we’ve heard of where levelling up gets you money off a sandwich. A first restaurant is hoped for in early 2027, and a smarter one in late 2027.
What they can’t have is the name. Andrew Meieran, who bought the building in 2010 and spent more than $14 million restoring it, closed it in April, citing crime, vandalism and falling foot traffic. “We’ve lost our way,” he told the Times. He has since sold the building to the Robhana Group but kept the Clifton’s name and its intellectual property, and hasn’t ruled out reviving the brand elsewhere. Hence Sanctuary. Biondich promises they are “not looking to radically change what this place looks and feels like,” which is reassuring, because how it looks is the whole point.
For the uninitiated, Clifton’s is one of the strangest buildings in America. Clifford Clinton opened his first cafeteria in 1931, and in 1939 he redecorated the Broadway branch as Clifton’s Brookdale, a fake redwood forest with a 20-foot waterfall, a life-size forest mural, a stuffed moose head and animated raccoons. The Los Angeles Times once called it “a slightly down-at-the-heels Disney version of a twilight forest”. It was, in other words, a fantasy world you could eat your dinner in, long before theme restaurants became a shopping-centre cliché.
That made it the natural home for the fan club that became the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, which met there in the 1930s and counted a teenage Bradbury among its regulars. Ackerman later remembered the move to Clifton’s chiefly for the free limeade, which tells you everything you need to know about fandom’s finances, then and now. Bradbury never forgot the place. He went back to Clifton’s to celebrate his 89th birthday in 2009.
So there is something rather lovely about it ending up as a giant role-playing game. A building that once hosted fans arguing about rocket ships over free limeade will now host fans pretending to be elves, possibly with an app. We would gently suggest a Bradbury quest line, a raccoon side-mission and a magic item called the Limeade of Endless Refills. And if the Society ever wants to hold a reunion, the dragons should at least let them have the back room.
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