Why Pomona matters.
Pomona is an agricultural-rooted enclave where Pomona Valley's foothill character meets Rancho San José history, citrus-era prosperity and an urban center whose architecture still traces the city's evolution from ranch land into an eastern Los Angeles County commercial hub.
Positioned between La Verne, Claremont, and Diamond Bar, the neighborhood occupies the broad eastern Pomona Valley beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, extending across relatively level basin terrain before rising toward foothills and the Chino Hills along its northern and southern margins. Gridded residential districts, surviving orchard-era houses, broad commercial corridors and concentrated prewar blocks around the center give Pomona a physical scale shaped by successive agricultural, rail and metropolitan phases. Garey Avenue supplies the primary encounter across the city, passing from northern residential districts into a denser center where masonry commercial buildings, civic structures and older storefronts compress the urban fabric. Mission Boulevard creates a secondary east-west passage through industrial and residential terrain that exposes the breadth of a settlement built across former ranch and agricultural ground. The result is a neighborhood whose physical breadth carries successive layers of Californio settlement, agricultural wealth and metropolitan growth across one of the Pomona Valley's most historically consequential urban centers.
What defines Pomona.
Pomona is best known for developing from Rancho San José into one of Southern California's major agricultural cities, with rail connections and intensive fruit cultivation driving its late nineteenth-century ascent. Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado granted Rancho San José to Ygnacio Palomares and Ricardo Vejar in 1837, placing much of the future city within a vast Californio ranch extending across the eastern San Gabriel and Pomona valleys. Palomares and Vejar prospered through cattle during the Gold Rush era, but floods, drought and the declining beef trade weakened the rancho during the 1860s and accelerated transfers of its acreage. Pomona emerged as a town during the following decade, and Southern Pacific rail service through the valley intensified development after reaching nearby Spadra in 1874. The community adopted the name of the Roman goddess of fruit, an unusually prescient choice as vineyards expanded during the 1880s before citrus and olive cultivation assumed greater importance during the 1890s. Pomona incorporated on January 6, 1888, as agricultural wealth and improved transportation strengthened its position within the valley. Pomona Valley Canning Company added an industrial dimension in 1916 with a plant dedicated initially to stone fruit, integrating preparation, processing, boxing and brand printing within a facility served by its own railroad stop. More than 400 seasonal employees worked there during peak periods, with women forming the great majority of the workforce. The company subsequently diversified into oranges and lemons as citrus eclipsed stone fruit, linking Pomona's industrial growth directly to the crop that had become central to the surrounding agricultural economy.
Millard Sheets redirected the center of Pomona toward an ambitious experiment in art and urban design when he redesigned nine blocks of 2nd Street as Pomona Mall in 1962. Five years of preparation preceded a pedestrian environment filled with trees, fountains, mosaics and sculpture, making the project an early national model for downtown retail renewal. Sheets brought fellow artists Arthur and Jean Ames, Betty Davenport Ford and John Svenson into the composition, turning public artwork into an integral part of the commercial streetscape. Howard Ahmanson placed a Home Savings and Loan branch there at Sheets's urging, and Sheets designed its prominent tower as part of the larger composition; Welton Becket and Associates created the modern Buffum's department store anchoring the eastern end. Retail vacancies weakened the original commercial concept within the decade, and five blocks reopened to automobiles in 1977. Artists simultaneously began occupying inexpensive downtown spaces, and a mural project started that year eventually produced the dA Center for the Arts. Arteco Partners began converting a dozen older properties into lofts, galleries and music venues in 1992, followed by formal recognition of the Pomona Arts Colony in 1994 and Paul and Perry Tollett's opening of the Glass House in 1997. Pomona's downtown moved from a nationally watched midcentury retail experiment into an arts district that retained substantial portions of Sheets's original public artwork within a radically altered cultural economy.
How Pomona fits.
Pomona works as the anchor for an outing connecting a nineteenth-century ranch estate, a museum devoted entirely to ceramic art and the college whose name preserves its brief origin in the city.
Begin at Phillips Mansion, completed in 1875 for Louis and Esther Phillips on land associated with the former Rancho San José and the settlement of Spadra. Joseph Mullally produced the red brick on site, and the Second Empire house incorporated a mansard roof, sixteen-foot ceilings, six fireplaces and cherry and maple woodwork brought inland from San Pedro. Louis Phillips had acquired extensive ranch acreage during the preceding decade and became one of the region's wealthiest landowners; the mansion remained with his family until the twentieth century before subdivision into apartments altered the property. The Historical Society of Pomona Valley acquired the threatened house for $45,000 in 1966, and the property entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Continue to American Museum of Ceramic Art, founded in Pomona in 2003 by David Armstrong after decades of collecting sparked by his study with Scripps College ceramicist Paul Soldner during the 1960s. Armstrong conceived an institution devoted specifically to clay within Southern California's deep ceramic tradition, initially placing it inside a 6,772-square-foot downtown storefront. Growth prompted acquisition of a former bank building in 2011, expanding the institution into 51,000 square feet with a 12,000-square-foot ceramics studio. Its collection now exceeds 13,000 pieces spanning world ceramics, American studio pottery and sculptural work, giving Pomona a specialist institution whose scope extends from ancient ceramic traditions through contemporary practice. Conclude at Pomona College, incorporated in 1887 by Congregationalists seeking to create a New England-style college in Southern California. Instruction began on September 12, 1888, inside five-room Ayer Cottage at 5th Street and White Avenue in Pomona with three college freshmen alongside preparatory and music students. An unfinished hotel and adjoining ground in nearby Claremont became available the following year, prompting the institution's relocation even as the Pomona name endured. President James A. Blaisdell later pursued a consortium modeled partly upon Oxford and Cambridge, leading to incorporation of The Claremont Colleges in 1925 and the subsequent creation of institutions including Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College and Pitzer College. The progression moves from the ranch wealth preceding Pomona's incorporation through a contemporary institution rooted in Southern California ceramic practice and culminates at a college whose migration to Claremont carried the Pomona name into one of American higher education's distinctive collegiate consortia.
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