Boundaries and communities of the San Gabriel Valley (Los Angeles, Garden Grove: home, school)

[mrsltd]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

Wow, I have never heard of Valinda, CA (or Hillgrove or Bassett, for that matter).

San Gabriel Valley - Mapping L.A. - Los Angeles Times

Valinda is up Azusa Ave north of Valley Blvd until you hit West Covina.

Bassett is a neighborhood west and north of La Puente, toward the San Gabriel River and the 605 freeway. My aunt and uncle lived there decades ago.

No idea about Hillgrove but will find out.

[mrsltd]

Hillgrove was an old CDP designation for the western part of what is now Hacienda Heights.

[SpaceMonkyPunks]

Originally Posted by Howiester

Downtown LA is the San Gabriel Valley?

Um, no? DTLA is not both east of the 110 and north of the 10.


As I already said, I'm very aware my description was not accurate to the actual borders of the area.

[Big L]

Originally Posted by mrsltd

Valinda is up Azusa Ave north of Valley Blvd until you hit West Covina.

Bassett is a neighborhood west and north of La Puente, toward the San Gabriel River and the 605 freeway. My aunt and uncle lived there decades ago.

No idea about Hillgrove but will find out.

I lived in Valinda with some relatives back in the day and briefly attended Workman High. Valinda actually stretches from the borders of Industry and La Puente to the west to the West Covina border to the east, but the unincorporated area south of Temple Avenue is not considered to be Valinda. That area was always called "East Side La Puente" by the locals and was simply called La Puente by most due to the mailing. I finished high school at Nogales High in (unincorporated) La Puente after we moved to West Covina near the intersection of Amar & Azusa, so I have a lot of first-hand experience with Valinda, West Covina, Walnut, and East Side La Puente. Gangs in Valinda and East Side La Puente were not friendly towards each other, so most people didn't confuse the two


You are on point with Bassett. I honestly had never heard of it until we got to Valinda and then West Covina. I know nothing about Hillgrove though.

[Big L]

Originally Posted by mrsltd

Once again, proving your screen name. Survey says: ehhhhhhhh!

Nothing there is "all Chinese". It's a mix of Asian and Hispanic folk, with healthy doses of "white" types and a good sprinkling of blacks, particularly in Altadena, Pasadena, and a bit of Monrovia.

Altadena has some especially awesome neighborhoods. Almost as if the houses are interlopers on the pine trees and land.

If that was an attempt at humor, gongggggg!!!!!!!

I am sure that black people in New Jersey would be incensed if I referred to every neighborhood they inhabited as "ghetto". Or, that if it wasn't black, it wasn't Newark, or Elizabeth, or Jersey City, or Camden.

I have an aunt that lives in Altadena a few blocks up from the Pasadena border. Her neighborhood is nice and very, very quiet. She's also only a few minutes away from the Rose Bowl.

[Maliblue]

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkyPunks

Probably not at all accurate in a....geological sense, but personally I always think of SGV like this:

East of the 110, south of the 210, west of the 605, north of the 10.

I think that is far too narrow.

If we want to use freeways as boundaries, it is more like this: East of the 710, west of the 57, north of the 60, south of the 210. That includes such quintessentially SGV communities as Monterey Park, Baldwin Park, Covina, and Walnut.

Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133

Out of all those towns, how many of them are practically all chinese? I think that be the real boundary

You kind of got smacked down for asking this, but let's be honest: A growing number of SGV cities are becoming Chinese-majority, and eventually they will all be. Monterey Park has been a Chinese-majority city for over 20 years now.

This does have practical ramifications for non-Chinese. In my city, San Gabriel, the Ralph's, Albertsons, Sizzler, Tony Roma's, Applebee's, and numerous other businesses have all been replaced by Chinese chains. The Temple City Ralph's is the last major supermarket left to buy a lot of American food products near here, and it will probably get replaced by a 168 market in due time. Eventually, it will become necessary to go to Arcadia or Pasadena for certain food items that are commonplace in the rest of America. Chinese supermarkets just don't sell them.

I live in a 24-unit apartment complex. I am the only non-Chinese in the entire complex. I seldom have opportunity to speak to non-Chinese people in my daily life, except cashiers at 7-11 and the like.

Most of my business clients are Chinese, so I moved here to be close to them. But I do sometimes wonder if things might not be going too far when American businesses become literally hard-to-find. Large sums of cash from Chinese buyers has also jacked up housing costs a lot in this region, for better and worse.

None of this is meant in a racist or anti-Chinese way; I depend on the Chinese for my living. However, I bet a lot of Americans would be amazed at just how Chinese this immense region has become. It is a mostly safe, mostly well-educated region. But it does feel like living in a foreign country sometimes.

[CA4Now]

"As a whole, the SGV is a vast area stretching from east of East L.A. all the way to the Inland Empire. The SGV's nearly 400 square miles...span from the edges of the city of Los Angeles on the west, to Pomona in the east, the towering San Gabriel Mountains in the north, and northeastern Orange County to the south."

A Brief History (and Geography) of the San Gabriel Valley: https://www.kcet.org/history-society...gabriel-valley

[nmnita]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

"As a whole, the SGV is a vast area stretching from east of East L.A. all the way to the Inland Empire. The SGV's nearly 400 square miles...span from the edges of the city of Los Angeles on the west, to Pomona in the east, the towering San Gabriel Mountains in the north, and northeastern Orange County to the south."

A Brief History (and Geography) of the San Gabriel Valley: https://www.kcet.org/history-society...gabriel-valley

thanks for sharing; it was a very interesting read. I will add, I was pretty much raised in SGV and hubby and I lived there for a good part of our adult life before leaving CA. He actually graduated from Citrus High school as it was called then. Now there is a Glendora high school where our son played baseball until his senior year when we left Ca. That was many years ago. We lived in Pasadena, Altadena, Arcadia and Glendora. We can both remember when the east Valley was mostly fruit trees. I remember when we would have picnics in the desert country side of Puente and pick prickly pears. There were no houses, nor did Hacienda Heights really exist.

For me, regardless of what legally are the boundries Pico Rivera is not SGV, nor is Montebello or Whittier. I pretty much think of the cities north of San Bernardino and a cities just south of there, starting with Pasadena, Alhambra, etc. and ending about San Dimas. East of San Dimas starts the IE.

I think every single city in the SGV has some great areas and some dumpy. The make up of the race or religions has little to do with it. I can also remember when you rarely saw an Asian in the valley. That started changing toward the end of the 1960s. There have always been sections that are primarily black or Hispanic. I think cities like Glendora are still mostly white. At least that is what our friends still living there have to say. Azusa has been Hispanic for years as has El Monte and La Puente. I guess there are a lot of things I remember about living in the valley. AS a young child we lived in a small area of LOs Angeles: Eagle Rock. From there we moved to SGV.

[NJ Brazen_3133]

Originally Posted by Maliblue

I think that is far too narrow.

If we want to use freeways as boundaries, it is more like this: East of the 710, west of the 57, north of the 60, south of the 210. That includes such quintessentially SGV communities as Monterey Park, Baldwin Park, Covina, and Walnut.



You kind of got smacked down for asking this, but let's be honest: A growing number of SGV cities are becoming Chinese-majority, and eventually they will all be. Monterey Park has been a Chinese-majority city for over 20 years now.

This does have practical ramifications for non-Chinese. In my city, San Gabriel, the Ralph's, Albertsons, Sizzler, Tony Roma's, Applebee's, and numerous other businesses have all been replaced by Chinese chains. The Temple City Ralph's is the last major supermarket left to buy a lot of American food products near here, and it will probably get replaced by a 168 market in due time. Eventually, it will become necessary to go to Arcadia or Pasadena for certain food items that are commonplace in the rest of America. Chinese supermarkets just don't sell them.

I live in a 24-unit apartment complex. I am the only non-Chinese in the entire complex. I seldom have opportunity to speak to non-Chinese people in my daily life, except cashiers at 7-11 and the like.

Most of my business clients are Chinese, so I moved here to be close to them. But I do sometimes wonder if things might not be going too far when American businesses become literally hard-to-find. Large sums of cash from Chinese buyers has also jacked up housing costs a lot in this region, for better and worse.

None of this is meant in a racist or anti-Chinese way; I depend on the Chinese for my living. However, I bet a lot of Americans would be amazed at just how Chinese this immense region has become. It is a mostly safe, mostly well-educated region. But it does feel like living in a foreign country sometimes.

I was just in SoCal last week. I noticed Artesia, Westminster, Garden are also becoming very chinese or asian. The chinese seem to have more wealth than the other two major minorities blacks and mexicans. More wealth more power, and that would mean more expansion as long as immigration keeps up. And China is the most populous country on Earth.

[Hapa1]

Originally Posted by Maliblue

Eventually, it will become necessary to go to Arcadia or Pasadena for certain food items that are commonplace in the rest of America. Chinese supermarkets just don't sell them.

Arcadia (where I live) has nearly as many Asians as Monterey Park does. I'm half Chinese myself, and enjoy shopping at stores throughout the SGV where I can practice speaking Mandarin.