Modern Music

As a kid, Frank Younce liked to hop on his skateboard and ride down to the Top Hat Burger Palace whenever he found enough spare change in the seat cushions of the family couch.

“It was an adventure,” he said of the 30-block journey. “I only took it when it could get the money together to buy a chili cheese dog.”

Younce, now 50, kept going to the Top Hat until he couldn’t anymore. That was in February 2010, when, after six decades at Palm and Main streets in downtown Ventura, Top Hat was evicted by the owners of the parking lot on which it sat in an 8-foot by 22-foot shack.

Aside from the boarded-up burger shack, the lot is unoccupied and surrounded by a chain-link fence.

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