The 100-year-old La Crescenta Business – La Crescenta Pharmacy

Whereas the business district of Montrose has a sense of long-term stability, Foothill Boulevard’s business center and anchor storefronts have shifted like wind-blown sand dunes in the desert. Although CV’s founder Benjamin Briggs laid out the “city center” of La Crescenta at Foothill and La Crescenta Avenue in 1884, other competing business blocks set up in a leapfrog pattern up and down the boulevard over the years. The businesses have been, and still are for the most part, transitory.

It’s hard to pin down a longest-lasting business in La Crescenta, but I’ll take a stab at it. I’ll give the “oldest La Crescenta business” title to La Crescenta Pharmacy with a start date of 1924. 

La Crescenta Pharmacy was first opened in 1924 by “Pappy” Bane on the corner of La Crescenta and Montrose avenues where the 7-Eleven is today. 

Pharmacies were the convenience stores of their day and Pappy Bane offered a wide variety of goods and services, including a soda fountain featuring locally made Crescent Ice Cream. The little store, built from local stone, received its supplies daily on the Glendale and Montrose trolley line that ran on Montrose Avenue, and in the quiet Crescenta Valley the store clerks could hear the trolley coming all the way down at Verdugo and Honolulu as it pulled out of the station.

In 1927 we find La Crescenta Pharmacy in a beautiful new brick building on the southeast corner of Foothill and La Crescenta, replacing the old wooden La Crescenta General Store and Post Office built in the 1880s. It would of course have featured the required soda fountain. Apparently in 1955 La Crescenta Pharmacy moved to a new retail building next door at 2764 Foothill where it still is today. A list of the pharmacists over the years includes Pappy Bane, Vic Nemechek, Bruno Barbaro, Herb Woloshin, Mort Farina and the much-loved Lou Fram.

The pharmacy today is owned by the dynamic and energetic “KB” Patel. KB was educated in pharmacology in London, England and moved to the U.S. in 1998 for better opportunities for his two kids. That gamble paid off as both kids have lucrative careers in medicine. Previous La Crescenta Pharmacy owner Lou Fram had died of a heart attack in March of ’98, and Lou’s brother was searching in vain for an independent pharmacist to buy the business. By August he had just about given up and signed the business over to Rite Aid when KB appeared. He bought it and has been running it successfully ever since. 

We can’t tell this story without recounting KB’s real-life role as an action hero. One afternoon in 2005, KB and another pharmacist were working alone in the dispensary. A young man walked in, went right past the counter and into the dispensary, walked up to KB, and pulled out a gun. KB quickly decided to resist, looked the gunman in the eye and reached out and slapped the gun downward. As the gun went down, it angled up and went off. The bullet went through KB’s bicep and into the ceiling. The gunman fled and KB went to the emergency room where he was bandaged up and, by 5 p.m., he was back behind the counter serving customers at La Crescenta Pharmacy. KB has left the bullet hole in the ceiling as a reminder of that day.

KB is fiercely independent and regularly receives offers to buy his business from giants Walgreens and CVS. KB’s strong sense of morality won’t allow him to sell out. He feels a responsibility to his staff and to the community to continue and said he works and makes decisions as though God is watching over his shoulder. 

La Crescenta Pharmacy personifies the community loyalty displayed by independent businessmen and after 100 years in business is a good representative as the “oldest business in La Crescenta.” 

Congratulations on a century of service to the community!