AMA Donuts in Pomona, a medium-sized city about 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, looks like many a roadside doughnut stand. There’s hot coffee and affordable doughnuts — chocolate glazed, maple bars and French crullers, of course — and inside the 24-hour shop, a handful of yellow linoleum booths allow customers to sit and enjoy said confections.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll notice that the shop’s sign is a familiar arching shape, and its red-and-white tiling, sloped roof and space-aged sign hearken back to a golden era for a certain fast food giant.

That’s because AMA Donuts is quietly housed in one of the oldest and most significant McDonald’s locations anywhere in America. The restaurant retains many of the same design features from the earliest days of the San Bernardino-founded fast food chain, before even Ray Kroc bought into the family brand and began to take it global. Today, AMA Donuts sits inside the second-oldest remaining McDonald’s anywhere in the world (second only to the famous one in Downey), yet few know that it exists.

Now, thanks to the city of Pomona, that will change — at least a little bit. On May 18, the city granted the building local landmark status, which provides heritage protections against redevelopment and demolition, and hopefully ensures that the secretly famous restaurant will keep on going for years to come.

The Pomona location was among the first franchises opened by brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald (the seventh, to be exact), debuting in 1954, the year before Kroc’s arrival and quick expansion into Illinois. The oldest McDonald’s, which is still operating in Downey and features the building’s original arches and walk-up ordering windows, opened as the brothers’ third restaurant just one year prior to Pomona’s arrival.

The AMA Donuts building, which featured a slanted roof and arches that lit up in neon during its heyday as a McDonald’s, was designed by architect Stanley Clark Meston, though it only operated as a McDonald’s until 1968. Other businesses, like a taqueria, have been housed within its walls in the years since, and AMA Donuts has been the tenant since 1986. Sadly, the building’s original signature double arches were already long gone by then.

The so-called Googie style of architecture used by Meston and other midcentury architects not only took inspiration from the space age and the country’s burgeoning car culture, but also served to differentiate McDonald’s from its competitors. Like many roadside stands of their time, the buildings were meant to be eye-catching, so as to lure in customers driving by.

According to a city of Pomona council report, the council found that “the property is an excellent example of early roadside architecture style developed and popularized in Southern California during a period when the nation was experiencing a significant shift of settlement and growth patterns.”

Many of the McDonald’s that featured this style of architecture were torn down over the years, sometimes by the brand itself as it introduced new, more modern restaurant designs in the 1970s and 1980s. The original McDonald’s in San Bernardino was demolished in 1972. The site now operates as a wacky, independently owned museum filled with all sorts of McDonald’s ephemera.

The Pomona location has certainly seen better days. The building itself looks a bit dilapidated, showing its decades of wear and tear, and it sits next to an empty lot on East Mission Boulevard with stray dogs and cats roaming around. SFGATE spoke with an employee at AMA Donuts, who was not willing to grant an interview about the new landmark designation.

That said, the city of Pomona — which has granted landmark status to 30 other locations, including adobes and a cemetery — is hopeful that there’s a better future in store for the site.

According to the Daily Bulletin, city Councilmember Steve Lustro said during the hearing granting the building landmark status: “It has the potential to become something with the right owner and the right vision.”

Whether that vision — and perhaps a new set of arches — comes to life remains to be seen.