John's Pipe Shop

John's Pipe Shop was a tobacco shop that opened in Los Angeles in 1908 and, for nearly seventy years, was one of the city's main destinations for pipe smokers. The business had no lathe or workshop of its own; it commissioned the pipes it sold from established European factories and put its own stamp on the goods once they arrived.

This is why "John's"-stamped pipes found on the secondary market today carry the identity of a retailer rather than a manufacturer.

Shops and Its Place in the City

The business's known address was on South Spring Street in early Los Angeles's commercial center; a second location later opened on Hollywood Boulevard. The existence of the two addresses can be traced through advertisements printed on matchbook covers, which today serve as a primary document for the business's history. It wasn't only the storefront that kept the shop in local memory but street advertising as well: a photograph dated to the first quarter of the century shows a horse-drawn cart with a giant model of a pipe bowl mounted on the back. The business also found its way into trade press of the era; a promotional piece devoted to the shop appears in an American pharmaceutical yearbook from 1916.