San Marino, CA

San Marino is a small, almost entirely residential city in the western San Gabriel Valley, part of Los Angeles County and set between Pasadena and San Gabriel. Homes change as you move east. The western and central streets filled in first, during the 1920s and 1930s, with Spanish Colonial, Monterey, English and Colonial Revival houses by architects such as Gordon Kaufmann, Reginald Johnson and Paul Williams, set far back behind wide lawns. Lacy Park is the town green, a broad lawn ringed by a shaded walking loop, with a rose garden, tennis courts and an arboretum of its own. Between those two and the old mill grounds, a lot of daily walking happens under big trees. Eating out is concentrated in two short strips. Mission Street has a few cafes, a gourmet prepared-foods market and a couple of lunch spots. Huntington Drive carries a longer run of Chinese and Taiwanese places, including Kitty's Cafe, which turns out Fuzhou dishes and Taiwan-style rice noodles. Huntington Drive, with the broad planted median where the old Red Cars once ran, is the main road east and west and holds the public library. Groceries and bigger shopping mean a drive into Pasadena, Alhambra or San Gabriel, since the city has almost no retail of its own. The tradeoff is sameness of housing. Once off Huntington Drive, most blocks carry little beyond local traffic, and the gardens behind the hedges shape the look of the place as much as the houses do.