Pomona, CA

Pomona is the big old city on Los Angeles County's eastern rim, the last stop before Claremont and the Inland Empire. It has more institutions than a suburb usually gets: the fairgrounds where the county fair lands every May, a Cal Poly campus in west Pomona, and a brick downtown with two kinds of trains. Downtown is the creative end, its Arts Colony packed into old brick blocks off Second Street. The Fox Theater, once a spot for Hollywood test screenings, now books concerts as Flyway, and AMOCA, the ceramics museum, opens on weekends up Garey Avenue. Metrolink trains and, since 2025, the Metro A Line both stop nearby. Lincoln Park, north of downtown, is a historic district of Victorians, Craftsman bungalows and Spanish cottages where peacocks wander the lawns. Wilton Heights wraps the fairgrounds with older houses near Ganesha Park and postwar ranches farther north. Eating out tends to be unfussy and long-running. Donahoo's on Garey has been battering chicken by hand for about seventy years. Pomona Valley Mining Co. Coffee people tend to mean Wish You Were Here, the roaster on East Third Street downtown. Ganesha Park is the big hilly lawn most people use, and Mountain Meadows, a public course from 1921, covers the western hills. RailGiants keeps enormous locomotives on the fairgrounds, and the Farm Store at Cal Poly sells campus-grown fruit and fresh orange juice. WinCo, Cardenas and the small markets along Holt handle groceries. Fair season and race weekends bring overflow parking to the streets around Fairplex. What holds it together is how much sits within one city limit, from a ceramics museum to a working campus farm within the same few miles.