Temple City, CA

Temple City is a flat, compact grid of small lots near the center of the San Gabriel Valley, and nearly everyone gives directions by one crossroads, Rosemead Boulevard at Las Tunas Drive. Arcadia, San Gabriel and Rosemead border it within Los Angeles County, and it has a smaller, more homespun scale than the bigger towns around it. Houses were meant to be modest here from the start, laid out a century ago on narrow lots aimed at ordinary buyers. The older stock is bungalows and postwar ranch houses. Summer Rolls does pho, banh mi and rice bowls, and El Ruizenor Grill on Temple City Boulevard is the neighborhood Mexican kitchen for fajitas and enchiladas. Fika Fika Coffee on Las Tunas brews floral lattes and turns out waffles and ube tarts, a good excuse to linger. Las Tunas fills in the gaps with noodle houses and bakeries. Temple City Park is the civic heart, home to the farmers market and to the Camellia Festival each February, a parade tradition that has run since the 1940s. Live Oak Park, toward the east end, gives ball teams more room, and a county lake park a few miles east handles longer walks. Groceries mean a short drive to a supermarket or one of the Asian markets on Rosemead. There is no rail stop in town, only bronze passengers along Rosemead marking where the old red cars once ran, and the closest trains are in Arcadia and Pasadena. All that rebuilding has a cost you can see on the street. Construction fences come and go, and the growing houses take up yard space that used to give blocks their open feel. Still, few towns in the valley let you walk from a bungalow to a bowl of noodles and back before the evening news.