Quiet Neighborhood Is Friendly Mixture of Old and New Homes : Artesia: International flavor pervades established community where home prices attract new residents.
For Esperanza De Vega and Joann Fili, their search for a new home in a quiet neighborhood ended when they found their four-bedroom, three-bath home in Artesia.
“The good thing about Artesia is it’s developing,” said Fili, 34, who manages a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant in Sunset Beach. “So you will see, if you go around this area, brand new houses and old houses.”
The friends, both natives of the Philippines, bought their 1,800-square-foot house in August, 1993, for $225,000. De Vega, 33, and a controller for SnakClub, a packaging and manufacturing firm in Vernon, and Fili both immigrated from the Philippines in the late 1980s.
The two women are the regular recipients of fruit and vegetables grown by their next-door neighbors, a retired Portuguese couple. “They are very hospitable,” said Fili. “We Oriental people, we feel the same way. We are hospitable people, so I feel very secure and at home.”
Artesia is situated near the southeast edge of Los Angeles County, and its 1.64 square miles are roughly bounded by the 91 Freeway on the north, South Street to the south, Cortner Avenue to the east, and Gridley Road to the west. The more than 15,000 residents are primarily blue-collar, largely Anglo and Latino, with growing numbers of Asians and Pacific Islanders.
House prices in Artesia range from $90,000 for a 600- or 700-square-foot house in an older neighborhood, to $750,000 and up for a huge five-bedroom custom home. The median price for a two-bedroom, one-bath house runs about $200,000.
“A lot of the people that are buying in Artesia are basically buying some of the older homes for land value,” said Frank Lee, owner of Century 21 Center in Artesia. “In many cases they are tearing those down and building much larger homes.”
Which is what happened next door to Janet Paglia. A grocery checker for Alpha-Beta in Torrance, Paglia, 41, and her husband, Dave, bought their 1920s three-bedroom, one home in 1992 for $170,000. The 1,000-square-foot house has large front and back yards for their two young children to play in.
“In this neighborhood, a lot of the people have knocked down their houses completely, and built big . . . houses,” Paglia said. But she’s not worried about Artesia’s new development. “I think that a lot of the houses that were knocked down should have been knocked down,” she said. “I think that’s fine, because it improves the neighborhood.”
Named for the abundance of artesian wells in the area, Artesia was subdivided in 1875 by the Los Angeles Immigration and Land Cooperative Assn., formed by a group of local farmers. Countless small farms grew a variety of crops, including corn, alfalfa, feed and sugar beets. Vineyards thrived and the Artesia Winery Co. was established in 1900, but Prohibition soon put the winery out of business.
Agriculture declined in the 1920s when the dairy industry began to grow. Portuguese immigrants came from Central California to work in what was then known as Dairy Valley, and by the 1930s, so had many Dutch immigrants from the Middle West. For nearly 30 years, the area was known as the Dairy Capital of the western United States, until the early 1970s, when rising real estate values tempted the dairies to sell to developers and the land was subdivided for housing tracts.
One longtime resident, Mary Barcelles, recalled the city in its early days. “We worked hard, walked to school a mile and a half, having crossed the dips filled with water, no drainage, no nothing.” Barcelles’ mother and father originally emigrated from the Azores to Central California in search of gold. Finding no gold, her father started a dairy, which he then brought to Artesia in the 1920s, along with his family, when Barcelles was a baby.
Her father bought five acres at $600 an acre, and set up the dairy. The whole family worked the dairy, with Barcelles and her sisters and brothers milking cows and doing chores after school.
Barcelles’ own two-bedroom, one-bath home was purchased from a local builder in the late 1950s for $10,000. She estimates she could sell the 1,000-square-foot home today for about $175,000. And even though over the years Barcelles has watched the dairies go and the city grow, she isn’t leaving Artesia any time soon. “I’ve really loved living in Artesia all my life,” she said. “It’s still a great, great city.”
One reason for Artesia’s growth is the influx of overseas immigrants who have moved to the area over the past 20 years. This growing ethnic diversity is most evident in the businesses that line Pioneer Boulevard, the main drag through the city.
“It’s kind of an international community,” said Richard Lee, son of realtor Frank Lee, and himself a commercial real estate broker. “If you drive the commercial district you’ll see Chinese shops, Korean shops, Filipino shops, white shops, Indian shops. A little bit of everything, kind of a hodgepodge.”
The Little India Chamber of Commerce, active for three years, represents the many small Indian businesses on Pioneer Boulevard, the commercial center catering to the more than 400,000 Asian Indians living in Southern California. “We have east, west, north, south, all the (Indian) communities are here,” said Ravi Merchant, owner of Patel Brothers grocery store on Pioneer Boulevard.
Back in the early 1960s, three Indian residents teamed up to sell hard-to-find Indian groceries and spices from their garages on weekends and to prepare home-cooked meals for Indians who missed their native foods. These weekend food fests quickly became a tradition for homesick Indians.
“The people who are living here since 20 to 25 years said that they used to wait for the tradition on Saturday and Sunday,” Merchant said.
The tradition grew, and when the dairies left the area, leaving empty shops, incentives were offered to rent the spaces along Pioneer, and more Indian merchants moved into the area. Today, Indian restaurants and Indian clothing, jewelry, music and video stores flourish.
Recently, the Indian merchants have been under fire from residents who object to a proposed sign on the 91 Freeway identifying Little India.
“We’ve had Portuguese here for 80 years and Dutch here for 80 years,” said Hank Grey, executive director for the Artesia Chamber of Commerce, “and nobody’s ever tried to name (it) the Little Netherlands, or Little Portugal, or little anything else.”
“It’s not that we want to change the name of the city,” said Ravi Merchant, “but we want to tell everybody that the Indian community is existing in the city of Artesia.”
But before there was a Little India there was Hank’s Coffee Shop on Pioneer Boulevard. Opened in 1959 by one of the original Dutch settlers, Henry Herrema, the diner was the social center of Artesia.
“I always bought his hamburgers and French fires,” said Mary Barcelles. “I took my kids down there.”
Herrema bought his first house as a newlywed in 1939 for $2,100. He now lives in a three-bedroom house he built 30 years ago, which he estimates is currently worth around $200,000.
Herrema, 73, retired 12 years ago, and has no plans for leaving Artesia. “I always think when people move out of town when they retire, they’re making a mistake,” he said, “cause they’re leaving all their friends.”
At a Glance
Population 1993 estimate: 6,178 1980-90 change: 1.9%
Annual income Per capita: 35,275 Median household: 44,909
Household distribution Less than $30,000: 23.6% $30,000 - $60,000: 43.6% $60,000 - $100,000: 24.6% $100,000 - $150,000: 5.8% $150,000 +: 2.3%
