The Spell of Claremont: La Cañada to Rancho Cucamonga - Southern California's Quiet Stronghold

The Spell of Claremont: La Cañada to Rancho Cucamonga - Southern California's Quiet Stronghold

I. Introduction: The Peaceful Paradox Drive east on the 210 freeway from Pasadena, something strange begins to happen. The chaos of Los Angeles with its density, drama, and dread seems to evaporate. By the time you reach La Cañada Flintridge, it’s [scene] The foothills rise, the air cools, the traffic thins (a little), and a palpable quiet settles over the landscape. Keep going through Glendora, Claremont, Upland, and finally Rancho Cucamonga, that sense of strange, durable peace only deepens to be finally lost in sparse San Bernardino/Fontana. How did this happen? Why did decades of Los Angeles' worst social violence ranging from gang wars & mass homelessness to riots & economic collapse fail to breach this invisible border? Why did our arc of suburbia nestled beneath the peak of the San Gabriel Mountains remain so uniquely, even stubbornly, calm? I call it what it is: a spell; A cultural & geographic charm forged out of policy, mountains, education, civic identity, with an absolute minimum pinch of snobbery as yeast to the bread. What was the center of that spell? A sleepy little town called Claremont, home to a small but elite cluster of colleges with a global reach. II. A Geography of Resistance A good spell starts with the settings, with the energies of the land. The foothill corridor from La Cañada to Rancho Cucamonga is bounded to the north by the San Gabriel Mountains and to the south by a series of natural and infrastructural dividers as well as the 10 & 60 freeways & many old citrus belt railroads. This terrain is not incidental. It created what urban geographers might call a semi-permeable membrane: difficult to penetrate, easy to defend, resistant to unchecked sprawl that quickly overwhelmed South LA & the San Fernando Valley. La Cañada Flintridge, the Western Gateway of our spell sets the tone. Wealthy, low-density, fiercely zoned, tucked behind the Verdugo Hills, it has long served as a quiet filter against the cultural entropy of central LA. Then come Altadena, Glendora, (where I grew up from birth in 1963 up through the 1990s), and San Dimas, all towns of medium to large lots carved from avocado and orange groves through horse properties in the hills & an expectation of generational homeownership. Unlike many Los Angeles neighborhoods built around renters, these towns were built around roots. Claremont, with its 7 Claremont Colleges, graduate university, college of theology & tree-lined, Euro-American charm, must have marked the spiritual center of the spell. III. Claremont: The Mind Behind the Barrier Founded in 1887 as a dry, academic colony, Claremont has always been something of an anomaly. Its colleges (Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, and two graduate schools) were built deliberately to be insulated and elite. They imported Eastern intellectual values and cloistered them in a California setting - a fusion of Ivy League polish and Western sprawl. This had several effects: It made Claremont a magnet for high-achieving, civically active but nationally aloof,residents many of whom stayed and raised families. It gave the region a cosmopolitan immune system blending privilege & classic liberalism that could filter ideas & people without succumbing to either naivety or nihilism. It created a local economy rooted in education, science & service, not industry or extraction & thus less vulnerable to economic shocks. Claremont sits just minutes from Mt. Baldy Village, the North Gate of the spell, the closest true alpine resort to Los Angeles. It's year-round appeal & added rare blend of recreation and contemplation brought Earth energy into the heart of the mix. You could ski in the morning, read Plato by noon, hitting a jazz bar in the village before bed. (The Baldy Lodge restaurant has the best quality ingredients!) IV. The Postwar Boom: Filtering the Middle Class The 1950s through the 1980s were when the spell truly solidified. As Los Angeles exploded, middle- and upper-middle-class families began fleeing the urban core. Some went to Orange County. Others went west. But a special kind came east, to the foothills. These were often veterans, engineers, teachers, civil servants,l & aerospace professionals, all people who wanted, and worked for, the American Dream without the drama. They bought homes in Glendora, La Verne, San Dimas, and Upland, building quiet lives around Little League, public schools, and safe streets. These weren’t flashy towns, though each had its nicer part. Growing up when I did in the 60s & 70s we kids didn't think of any but a few houses "rich", & nobody in Glendora/Covina was considered less than middle class. They did share a common character: Single-family zoning with the smallest yards ample falling off randomly to huge yards & old orchards. School districts that competed with & often outperformed private schools. Low rental density, often capped by city charter. There were maybe three apartment buildings nearby, none over 3 stories. Civic involvement, including powerful PTAs, watchful neighborhoods & city councils full of former engineers & teachers. Importantly, these communities welcomed diversity but were highly selective about behavior. Anyone could live there if they kept their lawn mowed, kids in school, and noise down after 9pm. I can attest that in grade school everyone, from Swedish to Mexican just acted like varihued locals...race & racial culture weren’t concepts to us kids. The family that referred to themselves as JIMinez seemed a hitvoaranger than most, but I didn't know, or care, why. It truly was a magic bubble. V. The Violence That Didn't Come From the 1960s onward, large portions of Los Angeles fell into waves of violence. The Watts Riots. The Crips and Bloods. The crack epidemic. The Rodney King beating & the 1992 riots. MS-13. Tent cities. Smash-and-grabs. All real, all tragic. But they didn’t make it past Azusa. Why? No major gang anchors ever took root in the foothills. Cities like Pomona and El Monte absorbed much of that spillover, creating a kind of outer ring buffer. Policing was local and proactive. Glendora PD, Claremont PD & the San Dimas LASD substation all maintained close ties with residents and didn’t allow street crime to fester without ever being an ominous presence to the kids. Economic continuity. These towns weren’t poor enough to collapse or rich enough to attract speculative investment. That middle-class stability created social inertia. Finally: Cultural pride & only a mild spicing of snobbery. People in Claremont or Glendora didn’t just live there. They bragged about it. They built identities around it. “We’re not LA,” they’d say. And they weren’t. Even today this persists. The appearance of a 1" by 2" Fuck Trump sticker on a park table at the pooch park was a flagrantly hostile gesture in an overwhelmingly leftwing town. It vanished within hours. Not a single person I know knows anyone who's seen Tesla vandalism. VI. Rancho Cucamonga: The Eastern Anchor It might surprise some that Rancho Cucamonga, now home to over 175,000 people, is part of this peaceful corridor. But it too fits the pattern. Developed heavily in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rancho was built with intentional master planning: wide roads, gated communities, mall districts & strong commercial tax bases. It had room to grow, but grew with rules. Yes, it touches Fontana and Ontario, cities with more urban issues. But Rancho drew a line quitevliterally with landscaping, zoning & private security. You can see the difference just by crossing Baseline Road. It also developed a strong identity: clean, prosperous, family-centered. It marketed itself as the new Glendora. This native son of that hallowed town say they succeeded. VII. The Cost of Peace? All spells come with prices. The peace of the foothills is not free. It’s paid for in: Long commutes for those working in LA proper, but this had us thinking about mileage and driving times when we chose jobs & homes before anyone else. High housing prices that lock out many young families today, but this took a long time to rise. Civic homogeneity, where social innovation can lag, but most of the changes, from helicopter parents to rubber playgrounds, have been questionable at best. Out of this... The spell holds. VIII. A Future Under Pressure The corridor from La Cañada to Rancho is now under pressure from several sides: The housing crisis is forcing denser development. LA County policies are nudging supportive housing eastward. Younger generations being pushed by disconnected political forcesbl into questioning the values of getting on with a good life in a good place. Will the spell hold? Maybe. If these towns can cope with "modernizing" forces without unraveling, they could offer America a new (to them) kind of suburban promise, inclusive peace, not just protected privilege. Claremont? Still the mind behind the charm. Still nestled between the mountains and the city. Still hosting philosophers, poets & scientists who walk under old-growth oaks debating with the meaning of justice. IX. Epilogue: Why It Mattered Then & Still Does Growing up in Glendora in the 1960s, I didn’t call it a spell. I called it life. Safe streets. School pride. Mountain views. Summer nights at the donut shop. No helicopters overhead. But looking back, can see it better now: a web of forces natural, civic & human holding the chaos at bay. A corridor where American normalcy was preserved, not as nostalgia, but as practice. That peace was rare even then. It’s beyond precious now. Believe what you wish, it wasn’t accidental. Call it what you want, it was Incidental. For those who lived it & still live it to this day it IS magic.