Where to Stay in Whittier, California

What is Whittier known for?

Whittier keeps a walkable shopping district of boutiques, restaurants, and a restored multi-screen cinema, and that concentration is unusual enough among the Gateway Cities of Los Angeles County to draw people in from outside. Cameras noticed early. Streets here stood in for an ordinary American town in Back to the Future and again in The Wonder Years, which is why parts of the city look familiar to visitors who have never set foot in Southern California.

What are the main landmarks in Whittier?

Brick and timber, not monuments. The National Bank of Whittier Building and the Standard Oil Building carry the commercial record, the Hoover Hotel carries the hospitality, and the Southern Pacific Railroad Depot recalls the years when a line rather than a road brought people in. Private homes account for the rest.

The Jonathan Bailey House and the Orin Jordan House stand as domestic survivors from the town's early decades, while Pio Pico State Historic Park preserves a site whose significance runs back beyond the founding of Whittier itself.

What is the history of Whittier?

The name honours a poet. Whittier carries the name of John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker writer, and the town that adopted it was incorporated in February 1898, then reorganised as a charter city in 1955. Older ground lies just outside.

Pio Pico State Historic Park keeps a site from the era before the town existed, and its presence explains why the district's history is usually told across a longer span than the city's own charter allows. Money followed oil and the railway. The Standard Oil Building and the Southern Pacific Railroad Depot survive from the decades when an oil company and a railway both kept premises in Whittier, and the National Bank of Whittier Building belongs to the same stretch of years.

Whittier College grew alongside them. A college in a town of this size shapes more than its calendar, and the institution has stayed central to how Whittier presents itself among the Gateway Cities. Hollywood arrived with a camera.

The Uptown streets stood in for an ordinary American town in Back to the Future and in The Wonder Years, and that borrowed familiarity now brings its own small traffic of visitors. The city outgrew its own limits. West Whittier-Los Nietos, North Whittier, South Whittier, and East Whittier all took the name while remaining unincorporated, and together they make the name reach well past the municipal boundary.

Where is Whittier?

Thirty-eight square kilometres, hemmed in. Whittier belongs to the Gateway Cities of Los Angeles County, with four unincorporated districts carrying its name pressed against the boundary on the outside, West Whittier-Los Nietos, North Whittier, South Whittier, and East Whittier. The line is hard to read on the ground.

Nothing in the street pattern announces where the city ends and its namesakes begin, which is a common condition across this part of Southern California.

What is the climate of Whittier?

Two seasons, unevenly split. The subtropical band running along Southern California gives Whittier a long dry stretch and a short wet one, with nearly all the rain arriving in the cool months and the rest of the year going by almost without it. Cloud is the exception.

Days in the dry stretch settle into a long run of clear skies, and the shade along the Uptown blocks earns its keep from midsummer through the first weeks of autumn.

How do you get to Whittier?

Roads carry it now. The Southern Pacific Railroad Depot survives as a building rather than as a way in, so arrivals into Whittier come by car across the Gateway Cities from wherever in Los Angeles County the journey started. Uptown rewards leaving the car.

The shopping district, the restored cinema, and the streets used in Back to the Future all sit close enough together that a single parking space serves an entire afternoon.