“Why can’t Biola be here?” my roommate and recent graduate from Biola, Jon Goossen, asked me in Pershing Square, near the heart of Los Angeles. Of course, Biola had been here, until it moved from its West 6th Street and South Hope Street locale to La Mirada in 1959. From a bustling urban environment full of different venues of entertainment, Biola settled into the sleepy outskirts of a city yet to be born. Today, La Mirada does not do much for the excitement seeker, but before I give La Mirada the award for the least exciting city in Los Angeles County, I am willing to give La Mirada another chance. Maybe, just maybe, I am missing something.
What Do We Have Here?
My journey for anything of interest in La Mirada started at the house of the longest resident of La Mirada that I know, David Peters, a political science professor at Biola for 40-some years and former six-time mayor of La Mirada.
“This is a poor man’s Beverly Hills; you get a good home for your money,” exclaimed a relaxed Peters from his reclining chair.
Since he arrived in this city in 1966, 47 years ago, the city has doubled its population from 23,000 to just under 49,000 today. With the change has come an exodus — the young grow up here and then they leave, Peters explained.
“This is a good, bedroom community,” Peters said, describing La Mirada’s status as an older, working class city.
When I ask him about thrilling things to do in the city, Peters gets excited, listing off the things that there are to do: Neff Mansion, the golf course, the horse trails, Splash! La Mirada’s Regional Aquatics Center and the many parks. So, I set out to find these places, to see if these were the hidden La Mirada enjoyments I had overlooked.
La Mirada’s parks are immaculate and plentiful. La Mirada Regional Park has one of the best disc golf courses in Los Angeles County, earning it 3.93 out of 5 discs on the online review of disc golf courses dgcoursereview.com.
Another great park in La Mirada is Neff Park, near Stage Road, which contains one of the first houses to be built in modern-day La Mirada: the Neff Mansion.
Yet, while the parks are a breath of fresh air, much of the rest of the city is not. Splash! is a location for children to let out every scream they have ever held back, and the horse trails are simply walkways with turds if you don’t keep a horse as a pet in your dorm room. On top of this, the other locales are not anything to write home about either. A question popped into my mind: “How did this place get so boring?”
The Young City
A battered, torn, broken and bruised green book lay in singularity among the giant books about La Mirada’s neighbors — Los Angeles, Whittier, La Habra — suffocated by their presence. Written in 1970, “La Mirada From Rancho to City” by C.W. ‘Bob’ Camp was the only book on La Mirada in the La Mirada Public Library itself. Nevertheless, it offered what I had been searching for: a history of La Mirada.
In the late 19th century, a man by the name of Andrew McNally stood on a hill overlooking his property — which was nearly identical to the boundaries of La Mirada today — of 2,738 acres and named what his eyes fell upon “La Mirada.” This phrase has been translated as many things, but “The Mirage,” makes the most sense to me. For what lies in La Mirada is a mirage of a true city — a place that has a city hall, a theater, a mayor, and lots and lots of houses, but not much else.
Today, La Mirada is noticed by the outside world in a few specific ways. It was declared a “Tree City USA” by the National Arbor Day Foundation, which is rather underwhelming considering that more than 135 million people in the U.S. live in a “Tree City USA.” The La Mirada Theater has also been hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “One of the best Broadway-style houses in Southern California,” and CNN Money placed the city at 34th on its 100 best places to live, using the criteria of safe streets, a sense of community, good schools and things to do.
The Quiet Hub
Sitting at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant down a side alley in the diamond district of Los Angeles, eating a shawarma — or Arab meat wrap — I came to a slow realization. All around me was noise: trucks unloading and loading, people shouting, and beeping cars. This is no place for a school. Imagine thousands of Biolans in their cars vying for parking spaces, girls running in Skid Row instead of Creek Park. La Mirada was starting to make a little more sense as the location for our university.
Perched in my hammock in my backyard garden, reading National Geographic magazines, I was content. No, I did not discover that Justin Bieber has a summer home here, or that there was an underground fight club. Yet, even for a person like me, who constantly needs to go somewhere, do something, and travel, La Mirada is a nice, calm change of pace.
What I found was thankfully a dull hub of a city that pushes us to explore other cities and the vast beauty that lies across the SoCal area. So get out of here for a while, but do come back.
