Getting to Know Pomona
The Lay of the Land
Pomona is an independent charter city of about 23 square miles in the Pomona Valley, in the eastern reaches of Los Angeles County, roughly 27 miles east of downtown LA. It is one of the larger cities in the county, with more than 150,000 residents and a density of around 6,600 people per square mile. It runs its own city government, its own police and fire departments, and sets its own rules on truck parking and oversized vehicles, separate from the City of Los Angeles. The 10, 57, 60, and 71 freeways converge around the city, making it one of the more accessible points in the eastern county.
The city is a patchwork of districts. Downtown holds the historic commercial core and the Pomona Arts Colony, a district of galleries, lofts, and the restored Fox Theater. Around it sit older residential neighborhoods, including the Victorian and Craftsman homes near Lincoln Park, one of the city’s historic preservation areas. Cal Poly Pomona anchors the northern edge of the city and brings a large student population and the apartment housing that serves it. To the south and west, Phillips Ranch is the city’s newest neighborhood, a largely residential, hilly area built up since the 1980s between downtown and Diamond Bar. The Fairplex grounds sit on the northwest side near the rail corridor.
From the Queen of the Citrus Belt
The valley was home to the Tongva people for thousands of years before Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado granted Rancho San Jose to the Californio rancheros Ygnacio Palomares and Ricardo Vejar in 1837. Their adobes still stand as museums, among the oldest buildings in the valley. The city took its name in a 1875 contest, honoring Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit, before a single commercial fruit tree had been planted, a bet on what the land would become.
The bet paid off. With the railroads and irrigation of the 1880s, Pomona became the western anchor of Southern California’s citrus country, the self-styled “Queen of the Citrus Belt,” and by the 1920s, it claimed one of the highest per-capita incomes in the nation, so much a picture of middle-class America that studios previewed films here in the 1940s to gauge the national mood. Pomona was incorporated in 1888 and adopted its charter in 1911. The Los Angeles County Fair arrived at the Fairplex in 1922 and grew into one of the largest county fairs in the country. As the citrus industry faded after the war, the city’s makeup shifted, and Pomona today is a large, diverse, predominantly Latino city that has reinvented its downtown around the arts while keeping the institutions, the Fair, the raceway, and the university that have long made it a regional draw.
What a Pomona Move Actually Involves
Pomona is its own city, so its rules, not the City of Los Angeles’s, shape every move. For larger moves, the city issues temporary no-parking permits that reserve curb space at the address, and these need to be arranged and posted in advance. Oversized vehicles face restrictions on some residential streets, so the truck has to suit the block.
The housing sets the pace of the work. The older homes near downtown and Lincoln Park have narrow doorways, tight original staircases, and finishes worth protecting, and the historic preservation areas mean many of these houses are valued for exactly that original detail. The newer homes in Phillips Ranch sit on hillier ground with two-story layouts and longer driveways. Student moves around the Cal Poly Pomona cluster at the start and end of terms, when apartments turn over, and demand peaks.
Distance is its own factor here; in a way, it is not on the Westside. A local Pomona move is straightforward, but many moves run between Pomona and the Westside, Orange County, or the Inland Empire, so the route and the freeway timing are part of the plan. We sort the permits, the access, the truck size, and the route before move day, so none of it slows the job down once we arrive.