Bell Gardens, CA

Bell Gardens is a small city squeezed between two river channels in the southeast part of Los Angeles County, with the Los Angeles River and the 710 along its western side and the Rio Hondo curving past its eastern parkland. The housing tells the story of how the city filled in. Much of the city grew during the Depression, and mobile home parks and manufactured houses from that era still dot the map. Most streets now hold postwar ranch homes and stucco cottages with Spanish touches, fenced front yards and long driveways leading back to a garage. John Anson Ford Park is the outdoor center of the city. People walk the path around its lake, play nine holes, swim at the aquatics center or ride out onto the Rio Hondo trail. Smaller neighborhood parks and a skate park cover the rest of town, and striped bike lanes on Florence and Gage connect them. Eastern Avenue is where people eat. Taquerias, seafood spots and burrito counters line the strip, and a shopping center near Florence has the coffee chain and quick bites. For a sit-down barbecue dinner, Chris' & Pitt's in neighboring Downey has run its barbecue pits since 1949. Daily errands stay close. Two supermarkets sit on Eastern Avenue a block apart, and city hall and the library share a campus on Garfield Avenue. Bigger shopping trips go north to the Citadel Outlets or east to Stonewood Center in Downey, and downtown is about ten miles away up the 710. The tradeoff is that Bell Gardens has one real commercial street. For a town this small, Bell Gardens holds a lot of time in one place, from a 1795 adobe to postwar tracts to a regional park that pulls in walkers from the cities around it.