Where to Stay in Pomona, California

What is Pomona known for?

The LA County Fair is what the city is known for beyond the San Gabriel Valley, while the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum covers the motorsport side. Art holds the other half. The American Museum of Ceramic Art and the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts carry the visual work, the Pomona Fox Theater the performances, and Cal Poly Pomona a campus that reaches into the city limits.

Citrus paid for the older streets.

What are the main landmarks in Pomona?

The Pomona Fox Theater anchors the old centre. Museums do the rest: the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, and the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts each hold a different corner of the city's cultural life. Buildings from earlier Pomona still stand.

The Ygnacio Palomares Adobe and La Casa Primera de Rancho San Jose date from the ranch years, while the Mayfair Hotel, the Barbara Greenwood Kindergarten, and the houses of Lincoln Park Historic District belong to the city that followed.

What is the history of Pomona?

Two ranchers came first. Ricardo Véjar and Ygnacio Palomares received an allotment here in the 1830s, when the territory was still part of Mexico, and La Casa Primera de Rancho San Jose and the Ygnacio Palomares Adobe survive from that arrangement. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo changed the sovereignty, and the land passed into the United States before the city itself was founded in 1888 and given the name of the Roman goddess of fruit.

Citrus made the name stick. By the 1920s the place was called the Queen of the Citrus Belt, a title earned by the groves that filled the valley floor around the town. Los Angeles County kept growing outward, and Pomona was absorbed into the built-up spread that runs across the San Gabriel Valley without a break.

The groves went. What replaced them shows in the institutions: the LA County Fair, Cal Poly Pomona with a campus reaching from the city limits into Walnut Islands, and the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum. Downtown held on to its theatre and its houses, so the Pomona Fox Theater, the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts, and Lincoln Park Historic District still read as the older city inside the newer one.

The American Museum of Ceramic Art belongs to that centre.

Where is Pomona?

Pomona occupies flat ground in the San Gabriel Valley, inside Los Angeles County and not far from Los Angeles itself. The valley floor carries it. There is no break in the built-up ground between here and the rest of the metropolitan spread, and the city limits run up against the unincorporated community of Walnut Islands on the Cal Poly Pomona side.

Within California this is valley floor rather than coast.

What is the climate of Pomona?

Heat gathers on the valley floor. The San Gabriel Valley lies inland of the coast, so the sea air that moderates Los Angeles arrives thinned out here and summer runs hotter and drier than it does nearer the water. Winters are short and mild.

That subtropical balance is what made the flats around Pomona citrus country in the first place, and it still keeps the growing season long across Los Angeles County.

How do you get to Pomona?

Roads do the arriving. Pomona sits inside the continuous built-up area of Los Angeles County, so approaches come across the San Gabriel Valley from every side and the city has no single entrance. Los Angeles lies out across the valley, close enough that Pomona works as a base for the wider county, and Cal Poly Pomona and Walnut Islands sit on the far edge of the city limits.

The LA County Fair draws the year's biggest crowds, and downtown around the Pomona Fox Theater takes its share of them.