Today, let’s take a look at a popular counter service restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, Rosie’s All American Cafe.

Today, let’s take a look at a popular counter service restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, Rosie’s All American Cafe.  It serves mostly burgers and given its close proximity to the Tower of Terror and Rock ‘n Roller Coaster, it gets a lot of foot traffic by it.  We’re not going to look at why the restaurant is there, but why the restaurant has that name.

Rosie’s All American Cafe is named after Rosie the Riveter,a cultural icon of the United States, representing the American women who worked in factories during World War II.  These women were taking up jobs that were vacated by men whom where fighting overseas and these jobs were often in the manufacturing plants that produced munitions and war supplies.  Posters portrayed the fictional Rosie as a woman with a "can do" attitude and often in the middle of driving rivets into something war related, such as a tank or airplane.

Let’s remember that Sunset Boulevard is set in the 1940s and this particular area of Sunset Boulevard features Rosies as well as a World War II victory garden nearby.  All of this helps to set the scene that we are now in the Hollywood of the World War II era.

Ironically, Rosie the Riveter, a feminist icon for women, is depicted at Rosie’s All American Cafe making food, a stereotypically female job of the era.