Best-Value Neighborhoods in La Mesa, CA

The La Mesa side of Fletcher Hills covers the rolling streets north of Interstate 8, where the city meets El Cajon and the land starts climbing toward Grossmont Summit. Most of the neighborhood carries the Fletcher Hills name with El Cajon, and on the ground the line between the two cities is hard to spot. Ed Fletcher, the San Diego developer whose name is on the hills, first laid out the area in the late 1920s. ... See Full Page

Lake Murray is the northwest side of La Mesa, a wide stretch of postwar streets that runs from Grossmont Center up to the edge of the reservoir it is named for. The lake itself sits just over the city line in San Diego's Mission Trails Regional Park, but for people living here it works like a backyard, reached in a few minutes from Lake Murray Boulevard. ... See Full Page

The name Grossmont goes back to 1910, when Ed Fletcher mapped a hillside subdivision east of La Mesa and named the big hill for his partner, William Gross. The opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink built a house there, and the writers and composers who followed earned the area its old nickname, the Grossmont Art Colony. Today the city neighborhood that carries the name stretches from the north side of the Village's main blocks east along Interstate 8 toward Grossmont Summit. ... See Full Page

La Mesa Village covers the big western half of La Mesa, running from the old depot where Spring Street meets La Mesa Boulevard out along University Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard to the San Diego line near Rolando. It holds the west end of downtown and a long run of residential hills behind it, so the name covers far more than the few blocks of shops most people picture. ... See Full Page

Roads start to bend and climb on the western slope of Mount Helix, and the slice of that slope inside La Mesa city limits is where this neighborhood sits. Most of the mountain lies in the unincorporated county, so this is the city's own share of it, a few minutes uphill from the Village and Grossmont Center. ... See Full Page

Mount Nebo takes in the south side of downtown La Mesa, from the storefronts along La Mesa Boulevard back through Palm Avenue and Spring Street toward the hill whose name it borrows. The original landowner named that summit after the biblical mountain, and the early Mount Nebo Lookout Park tract of 1908 laid out the hillside paths that people now call the Secret Stairs. ... See Full Page