Where to Stay in Arcadia, California

What is Arcadia known for?

Santa Anita Park brings the racing, the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden brings the planting, and Arcadia County Park closes the chain, so an unusually large share of this city is green and open rather than built. Gardens are the reason most people come. The name comes from elsewhere entirely, borrowed from Arcadia in Greece, and the pastoral idea behind that borrowing has turned out to fit a place in Los Angeles County that put its parks first.

What are the main landmarks in Arcadia?

One family name keeps reappearing. The Reid-Baldwin Adobe is the oldest surviving fabric on the list, the Anita Baldwin house carries the same surname into a later and grander idiom, and the Queen Anne Cottage and Coach Barn completes a trio that gives the city an unusually coherent set of historic buildings. Arcadia's churches account for the rest of the list.

The Episcopal Church of the Ascension and Our Lady of the Angels Church are the two that stand out, while Santa Anita Park remains the single structure most visitors to Los Angeles County would recognise by name.

What is the history of Arcadia?

Adobe came first. The Reid-Baldwin Adobe represents the earliest building tradition still standing on this ground, raised in the material and manner used across the San Gabriel Valley long before the city took the shape it has, and its survival is the reason Arcadia can point to a start rather than merely to a subdivision date. Land was held in large blocks then.

The estates that covered the flat country at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains left the pattern of open space that the city later turned into its chain of parks. The Baldwin name runs through the next chapter. Both the Anita Baldwin house and the Queen Anne Cottage and Coach Barn belong to a period when a single family's holdings shaped what got built here, and the ornamental character of those buildings sits oddly beside the plain adobe that preceded them.

Congregations followed the households. The Episcopal Church of the Ascension and Our Lady of the Angels Church mark the point at which a scatter of estates became a settled community with institutions of its own. The choice of name looked backwards and outwards at once, taking Arcadia from Greece and its pastoral associations with it, and the later decision to keep Santa Anita Park, the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, and Arcadia County Park as one continuous green belt honoured that borrowing more closely than most such names ever are.

Where is Arcadia?

Mountains close the view to one side. Arcadia occupies level ground in the San Gabriel Valley within Los Angeles County, California, in the United States, with the wall of the San Gabriel Mountains rising directly behind the city and the built-up floor of the valley running away from it in every other direction. Downtown Los Angeles is 13 miles off.

The three adjacent parks take up a broad band across the middle of the municipal area.

What is the climate of Arcadia?

The San Gabriel Mountains do the shaping. Standing directly behind Arcadia, the range shelters the valley floor from whatever comes over the top of it and throws its shadow across the city late in the day, while the subtropical band supplies long warm spells and a short mild cool season. Gardens thrive on that combination.

The planting at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden is the clearest evidence of what the San Gabriel Valley climate will support.

How do you get to Arcadia?

Aim for the mountains. The San Gabriel Mountains are visible for most of the 13 miles up from downtown Los Angeles, and holding them ahead of you is the simplest way to keep your bearings on a run out through the San Gabriel Valley. The last stretch is flat and straight.

Santa Anita Park is the landmark that tells you the drive is over, standing at the head of the chain of parks that fills the middle of the city.