On a bookcase in Anne Young’s living room sits a Kip’s Big Boy bank, a memento of happy times spent eating burgers and hot fudge sundaes with her grandparents.

“It was a great place for a kid,” she says. “We’d sit at the counter, which felt very grown up. They were very happy memories.”

The 35-year-old now lives just two blocks from the Northwest Highway and Hillcrest location of that Kip’s restaurant, which later became EZ’s Coffee Shop.

She used to feel comforted when passing that spot. Now she winces or avoids looking. The only thing left of the 1964 structure, designed in an architectural style known as Googie, is a concrete slab.

On May 6, bulldozers flattened EZ’s. Preservation Dallas gave the building a posthumous mention three weeks later when releasing its annual list of Dallas’ Most Endangered Historic Places.

“I just wanted to burst into tears,” Young says of witnessing the demolition. “It was so sad. I was shocked that it happened so fast.”

Dwayne Jones, executive director of Preservation Dallas, says the demolition decision happened too quickly to organize any meaningful protests. Getting landmark status for a building takes six months to a year. Without it, owners are free to do what they want with their property, he says.

“That building really had an identity there, a strong character to it,” he says. “There are only a handful of those left, and none as architecturally distinguishable as that one.”

Armet & Davis Architects of Southern California designed the building for early Dallas restaurateur Fred Bell, according to Preservation Dallas. Googie, first popular in Southern California in the late 1940s, was the futuristic style of architecture seen in the coffee shops and bowling alleys of the time.

Former City Councilwoman Veletta Forsythe Lill, known for her dedication to historical preservation, says many people who grew up with 1950s-era architecture do not see its historical value.

“It’s still new to them; it’s hard to recognize the significance of it,” she says. “The move to preserve new architecture is still developing. I don’t think we realize the urgency of that.”

The 7-Eleven company owns the property and plans to relocate its existing Hillcrest-Northwest Highway store, which sits on a neighboring lot, to the restaurant’s former location, spokeswoman Margaret Chabris says.

Rent for the existing store’s land has been getting more and more expensive, so the company chose to move to property it already owned, she says.

The company did salvage the EZ’s sign from the restaurant, and officials hope to see preserved by a collector, Chabris says.

“We’d like to give it to someone for whom it has meaning,” she says.

Preservation Dallas called the Kip’s/EZ’s restaurant an aspect of cultural history worth saving. Lill says convincing the public about the value of such buildings will take education.

“You hope that you can encourage through a sense of civic pride and incentives for the property owners to preserve these buildings,” she says.

Young says she will be paying closer attention to preservation efforts. Many older buildings in her neighborhood are being replaced, she says.

“I’m surrounded by quote-unquote progress,” she says. “It seems like everything old around here is being torn down. It’s so rare that Dallas looks back and appreciates what it has. Developers get the last word.”