We've gotten used to L.A.'s littles and towns - among them Little Ethiopia, Koreatown, Little Armenia, Filipinotown - the places where immigrant aspiration gets a foothold, nostalgia is served, and Jonathan Gold finds the joints he loves. Official recognition of the city's ethnic neighborhoods is fairly recent, but Los Angeles has always been culturally diverse, even as far back as the end of the Mexican colonial period and the start of the city's Americanization.
French and Italian communities clustered around the old plaza in the mid-19th century, as did Basques and German Jews, creating some of the city's earliest civic institutions. Sonoratown, north of the plaza, and old Chinatown to the east kept those ethnic communities at a distance. At the edge of San Pedro, a Japanese fishing village - Furusato - flourished on Terminal Island from the turn of the century until World War II and internment.
South and east of downtown, along the Orange County border and straddling it, are lesser-known ethnic communities that continue to hybridize with suburban Los Angeles. Milk made two of them: Bellflower and Artesia, where Holland and the Azores met.
Southeast Los Angeles County is a landscape bounded by the San Gabriel River to the east and the Los Angeles River to the west. It's roughly where the former ranchos Los Cerritos, Los Alamitos, and Los Coyotes share the floodplains of the two rivers. Their annual wandering kept the land open pasture until the last decades of the 19th century, when sheep raising gave way to more intensified agriculture.
By the turn of the century, the southeast was parceled out as fields, orchards, hog farms, and feed lots along a few country roads. Where they crossed, the communities of Bellflower and Artesia grew up around a general store, a hay broker, a post office, a church, and a stop on the Pacific Electric (PE) line that connected Los Angeles to Santa Ana.
By 1900, Artesia (named for its artesian wells) had, according to the city's boosters, a hotel, general store, agricultural implement house, blacksmith shop, and a handsome' schoolhouse built in 1875. German immigrants, like those who founded Anaheim, were among the orchardists and stock raisers, but turban-wearing Hindus were some of the laborers in the groves. The Little India of Artesia's Pioneer Boulevard was 70 years away.
Bellflower was begun by Los Angeles real estate promoter F. E. Woodruff in 1906 (and named Somerset in 1909). Claire S. Thompson built the general store in 1910. The town had a population of 100. By 1912, it was 1,200.
The first general store in Bellflower, 1910. Photo courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.
--
--
Bellflower celebrates Independence Day, 1915. The street is Bellflower Boulevard now. Photo courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library
Bellflower Boulevard at Flower Street, 1956. Photo courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library
The PE stops in both towns, still unincorporated then, produced an unusual kind of agricultural community. Town lots in Bellflower were big enough for small-scale farming and chicken ranching. Larger parcels in Artesia allowed for fruit cultivation, plant nurseries, and vegetable plots. But the PE also gave residents access to jobs in Los Angeles. (Bellflower Boulevard to Spring Street took just 40 minutes.) The farmer/commuter of 1912 rode the PE to work weekdays and farmed on weekends.
Suburban farmers were fewer by the mid-1920s, as orchards and fields in Bellflower and Artesia were subdivided for house lots, but eight or ten acres along the San Gabriel River was enough for a dairying operation, if it was run right. Instead of on open pasture, dairymen kept their cows penned in lots. Good genetics and good feed produced 400 pounds of milk per year per cow, double the national average.
Pete Van Leeuwen, who had come to Bellflower in 1926, told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 1987, I would climb on top of a haystack, and I could count 20 little dairies along Woodruff, Palo Verde and South Street. There were eventually more than 400 dairies and more than 100,000 cows in the riverside towns. Southeast Los Angeles County was the largest milk-producing region in the state.
Like Van Leeuwen, many of the dairymen were from the Netherlands, many of them rural immigrants from crowded Friesland, who had arrived before World War II, as well as Hollanders who came as refugees from post-war devastation and famine. (1944-45 had been the Hongerwinter - Hunger Winter in Dutch.) They were followed in the early 1950s by Dutch-speaking families - some of mixed race - that had fled newly independent Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) only to face hardship and discrimination in the Netherlands.
Dairying on the drylot model spread up the banks of the San Gabriel River to Downey, Paramount, La Mirada, Cerritos, La Palma, Cypress, and Norwalk, as well as to Bellflower and Artesia. Most dairies were small, but some combined adjacent properties into a larger operation. Nearly all were family owned.
Bellflower and Artesia welcomed the Dutch-speaking immigrants. There were jobs for experienced dairymen and opportunities to buy land. Banks founded during the first wave of immigration in the 1920s financed the purchases. Congregations of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Christian Reformed Church attended Sunday services whose sermons were in Dutch. A church-affiliated elementary school (and, later, a high school) educated the immigrants' children. Dutch social clubs and even a church-affiliated retirement home gave immigrants a sense of stability. Bakeries and specialty markets satisfied their nostalgic longings.
A 27-acre, Dutch-themed shopping center opened in nearby Lakewood, along with a bowling al
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
We've gotten used to L.A.'s littles and towns - among them Little Ethiopia, Koreatown, Little Armenia, Filipinotown - the places where immigrant aspiration gets a foothold, nostalgia is served, and Jonathan Gold finds the joints he loves. Official recognition of the city's ethnic neighborhoods is fairly recent, but Los Angeles has always been culturally diverse, even as far back as the end of the Mexican colonial period and the start of the city's Americanization.
