Where to Stay in Lakewood, California

What is Lakewood known for?

Lakewood became a city in 1954, and its grid of boulevards and tract streets belongs to the suburban expansion of the Gateway Cities rather than to anything older beneath it. Long Beach surrounds it on three sides. The Aquarium of the Pacific, the Museum of Latin American Art, and the Long Beach Museum of Art all stand in that neighbouring city, while Knott's Berry Farm and its coasters pull the day trips in the opposite direction.

What are the main landmarks in Lakewood?

Ranch land came before the tracts. Los Cerritos Ranch House survives from that earlier period, and the Oldest McDonald's restaurant counts as a landmark of an entirely different order. Long Beach supplies most of the rest.

The Aquarium of the Pacific, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Long Beach Shoreline Marina all stand in the city that wraps three sides of Lakewood, while Knott's Berry Farm and its coasters, GhostRider and Xcelerator among them, pull day trips the other way.

What is the history of Lakewood?

Ranching held this ground first. Los Cerritos Ranch House is the survivor of that period, a building from a landscape of open holdings rather than from the street grid that covers the same country now. Everything else is recent.

The city was incorporated in 1954, which places its whole existence inside the suburban expansion that filled the Gateway Cities of Los Angeles County in the middle of the twentieth century, and the plan still shows that origin block by block. Boulevards did the organising. Lakewood, Bellflower, and Del Amo Boulevards run as the main crossings, Carson Street and South Street complete the frame, and the San Gabriel River Freeway later cut through the eastern regions to tie the place into the wider road network.

Long Beach had grown first and closed around three sides of the new city, leaving Bellflower on the north, Cerritos on the north-east, Cypress on the east, and Hawaiian Gardens on the south-east. Churches came with the houses. First Congregational Church and St Luke's Episcopal Church are among the named congregations here.

Motor sport left a trace of its own at Lions Drag Strip, and the attractions that shaped later decades, Knott's Berry Farm above all, drew on exactly the suburban population these tracts had created.

Where is Lakewood?

Lakewood takes flat ground in the Gateway Cities part of Los Angeles County, with Long Beach on the west, north-west, and south of it. Nothing here rises. Bellflower lies north, Cerritos north-east, Cypress east, and Hawaiian Gardens south-east, which leaves the city entirely enclosed by other cities and gives it no open edge at all.

The San Gabriel River Freeway runs through the eastern regions.

What is the climate of Lakewood?

The coast at Long Beach does the tempering. Air off the water crosses flat ground the whole way in without anything to block it, which holds the subtropical warmth steady enough that the seasons here are told apart by rain rather than by cold. Winter carries that rain.

Dry months take the rest of the year, and the boulevards, tract streets, and open lots of this part of the Gateway Cities look much the same in one as in another.

How do you get to Lakewood?

The San Gabriel River Freeway is the way in. It runs through the eastern regions of the city and ties Lakewood into the road network of Los Angeles County, which is how very nearly everyone gets here. Boulevards handle the rest.

Lakewood, Bellflower, and Del Amo Boulevards cross the grid, Carson Street and South Street run the other way, and Long Beach, Cerritos, Cypress, and Hawaiian Gardens are each a few minutes off by car.