Sierra Madre, CA

Sierra Madre calls itself the Village of the Foothills, and the name fits better than most civic slogans. Life in this small Los Angeles County town runs on a calendar of homegrown events, from a spring flower festival to a Fourth of July parade to a footrace up the old Mount Wilson Trail. Below the main street, the land is gentle and the blocks are full of early twentieth century bungalows and cottages under big old trees. Above it, lots get steeper and irregular as the streets wind up toward the canyons, and newer homes appear among the older ones. Getting outside takes almost no effort. The canyon trailhead where the streets run out at the top of town is where many people start a hike before work, and several trailheads can be reached on foot from residential streets. Fire has shaped the backcountry in recent years, so trail access up high can change with the seasons. The downtown is a few walkable blocks where Baldwin Avenue meets Sierra Madre Boulevard, and it still feels like a place people run into each other. Bean Town on Baldwin is the coffee stop, the kind of room where board games and a stack of community flyers share the tables. Daily errands mostly stay local for small things, with a small market, a library and a few bakeries and cafes. For a full supermarket or big box store, people drive into Pasadena or Arcadia. The Metro A Line station at Sierra Madre Villa sits across the border in Pasadena, and the 210 is a few minutes south. The tradeoff is scale. Sierra Madre has almost no big commercial space, so a lot of shopping happens in the cities next door. What it keeps instead is a downtown small enough to learn by name, where the theater, the coffeehouse and the trailhead share one short walk.