Glendora, California

Why you should experience Glendora in Los Angeles, California.

Glendora is a foothill enclave where the eastern San Gabriel Valley's suburban character meets a nineteenth-century town center, residential hillsides and mountain canyons rising directly into the San Gabriel range.

Positioned between Azusa, San Dimas, and Covina, the area occupies the northern edge of the valley floor, extending through Foothill Boulevard, Glendora Avenue and Route 66 from the South Hills toward the mouth of Big Dalton Canyon. Residential streets climb north from the flatter commercial corridors into increasingly irregular foothill terrain, where early cottages, Period Revival houses, postwar residences and larger hillside properties follow the rising ground. Movement through Glendora shifts between long east-west avenues and north-south streets that terminate against the mountains, producing repeated views toward steep canyon walls from blocks still embedded within the metropolitan basin. The South Hills create a second topographic boundary across the southern reaches, enclosing lower neighborhoods between two elevated landscapes before the terrain opens toward neighboring valley communities. The result is a greater area whose mountain front, enclosed valley setting, historic town center and successive residential layers preserve an unusually legible transition between the San Gabriel Valley floor and the wilderness immediately above it.

What you should know about Glendora.

Glendora is best known for emerging from George D. Whitcomb's 1885 purchase of a 200-acre rectangle that became the nucleus of a new foothill town beside the developing Santa Fe railway. Whitcomb, a Chicago manufacturer who had come to Southern California for his health, paid $40 an acre and persuaded the railroad to move its proposed Pasadena-to-San Bernardino route north of the South Hills and closer to his property. He created the name Glendora by combining the glen at the northern end of his tract with part of his wife Leadora's name, tying the town directly to both its physical setting and his family. Whitcomb joined John W. Cook and Merrick Reynolds in forming the Glendora Land Company early in 1887, after which streets were graded, water mains installed and 6,000 young pepper trees planted along the new roads. North-south streets received names associated with states and places significant to Whitcomb, and east-west streets took names connected with his family. The first public land sale began on April 1, 1887, when Jefferson Patton paid $500 for a parcel at Bennett and Michigan avenues plus another $500 for first choice. Buyers purchased 291 lots that day, giving the speculative town an extraordinary initial burst before the Southern California real-estate collapse later in the decade weakened demand. Glendora recovered gradually and incorporated on November 13, 1911 with 700 residents across 2.5 square miles, carrying Whitcomb's privately conceived railway town into municipal life less than a quarter-century after its creation.

Technological invention and wartime industry pushed the foothill town into a different economic era during the middle twentieth century. Citrus grower Orton Englehart created the horizontal-action impact sprinkler in Glendora in 1933, developing a device that distributed water through a rotating head powered by the force of the water itself. Neighbor Clem LaFetra recognized its commercial possibilities, financed its production and joined Englehart in the enterprise that became Rain Bird, a name derived from the sprinkler itself. The invention ultimately altered irrigation far beyond the valley by making controlled overhead watering practical across agricultural ground that had previously depended heavily on other distribution systems. World War II brought another industrial departure when a propeller plant operated in Glendora as part of Southern California's immense defense economy, shifting local employment toward manufacturing during the national mobilization. Residential construction accelerated after the war, and large subdivisions spread through ground that had remained open during the preceding decades as metropolitan Los Angeles expanded eastward. The city acquired 650 acres in Big Dalton Canyon with the assets of the Glendora Irrigating Company in 1965, placing a substantial mountain landscape under municipal ownership as growth continued below. Fire burned 23,000 acres of watershed above Glendora in July 1968, and intense storms during January and February 1969 subsequently drove mud, water and debris into foothill houses, burying some properties beneath the runoff. The Foothill Freeway reached through Glendora in 1973, completing another shift in regional access as the former railway town became increasingly integrated into the freeway metropolis. Glendora had moved within several generations from a speculative foothill settlement into an industrial and residential city whose expansion remained physically constrained by the mountains that had shaped Whitcomb's original tract.

How to fold Glendora into your trip.

Glendora works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting an extraordinary hand-built architectural environment, among California's earliest community colleges and a canyon landscape shaped by decades of local stewardship.

Begin at Rubel Castle, where Michael Clarke Rubel transformed a former citrus property into a 22,000-square-foot folk-art complex assembled through decades of collective labor. Rubel acquired part of the former Albourne Ranch in 1959 at age nineteen, taking possession of a reservoir and packing house as surrounding groves disappeared beneath residential construction. He converted the packing house into a residence, turning its former cold-storage rooms into bedrooms before his mother Dorothy moved there in 1961 and entertained Hollywood acquaintances at gatherings that gave the building its nickname, the Tin Palace. A 30-horsepower Western pump engine arrived from Glendora Mountain Road in 1965 as Rubel accumulated machinery, stone and salvaged objects across the property. Friends, townspeople and the group known as Pharm Hands helped extend the castle through towers, walls and unconventional structural components until the principal construction campaign ended in 1986. The Glendora Historical Society now owns the complex, which entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Continue to Citrus College, founded under Floyd S. Hayden's leadership on June 5, 1915 as the first junior college in Los Angeles County and the fifth in California. Twenty-seven students and six faculty members formed its first class on the Citrus Union High School campus at Dalton Hill, with mathematics, languages, physics, English and economics among the original subjects. Four students composed the first graduating class in 1917. Local voters approved a $300,000 bond in 1920 for a new campus, and architects John C. Austin and W. Horace Austin designed the Spanish Renaissance school complex constructed at Foothill Boulevard and present-day Barranca Avenue. The cornerstone was laid on June 15, 1922, moving the institution onto the site from which it subsequently expanded. Citrus College purchased 88 additional acres between 1946 and 1959, increasing the campus from sixteen to 104 acres as the institution separated from the high-school district and developed into an independent college system. Conclude at Big Dalton Wilderness Area & Rowley Amphitheater, where Glendora's urban edge gives way to the canyon terrain of the San Gabriel Mountains. Gordon Rowley moved to Glendora with his family in 1956 and spent thirty-four years with the U.S. Forest Service, eventually receiving the bronze Smokey Bear award for his work in forest-fire prevention. Rowley became a founding member of the volunteer group that developed local riding and hiking routes and helped shape recreational facilities within Big Dalton Canyon. The campground, picnic ground, pedestrian bridge and amphitheater became a formally named recreational area on May 10, 1985, carrying that volunteer effort into a permanent foothill site. The progression moves from Michael Rubel's decades-long construction of an architectural world through Floyd Hayden's pioneering experiment in local higher education and culminates in the canyon where Gordon Rowley joined public service with mountain stewardship, connecting three highly individual contributions to Glendora's cultural life.

MAKE IT REAL