As with people, there are some cities...

As with people, there are some cities that are willing to gamble and some that aren’t.

Gardena--despite the name’s pastoral connotations--always has been one of those municipalities willing to take a chance. At the turn of the century, the town was known as a garden spot, and its fertile soil attracted immigrant Japanese farm families whose skills produced a cornucopia of produce.

The town began with a general store at Figueroa and 161st streets. By 1889, the opening of the Redondo Railway line shifted the central part of town to what is now Vermont Avenue and Gardena Boulevard.

The immigrant farmers harvested strawberries and shipped their red wares daily to Los Angeles on the Red Cars.

But by 1930, when modern Gardena incorporated within its boundaries the rural communities of Gardena, Moneta, Strawberry Park, Broadacres, Hermosillo and Western City, the profitable strawberry crops were virtually gone, the soil exhausted. However, the strawberry blossom was named the city’s official flower.

At that point, the city’s focus shifted from chancy harvests to games of chance.

Years before Bugsy Siegel knew how to spell Las Vegas, Gardena city officials convinced a judge that poker was a game of skill and not of chance. The city staked its future on the draw of the cards--and, as the first California city to legalize draw poker, helped turn gambling into a million-dollar business.

In 1936, Gardena’s first card club, the Embassy Palace, opened with a mixed blessing of tax revenues and accusations of mob influence and political shenanigans.

With Lady Luck seemingly on its side, Gardena flourished even as glittering gambling ships anchored off Los Angeles’ coastline shut down.

In 1946, at the urging of some local ministers and other anti-gambling residents, a referendum was held on whether to outlaw poker in Gardena. The industry survived that challenge amid charges that the election had been bought.

For almost half a century, card club license fees and taxes were a major source of the city’s revenue. Six card casinos, employing about 3,000 people, helped build many city-owned facilities and pumped thousands of dollars into civic groups and causes, including fund-raising drives for organizations such as the Gardena Valley YMCA.

In the late 1970s, after tax-cutting Proposition 13 sent cities into economic tailspins, dealing cards for cash seemed like a winning way to balance the books. Card casinos began opening in nearby cities, prompting all but two of Gardena’s clubs to close. Now, only the marquees of the Normandie and the Eldorado shine nightly along Rosecrans and Vermont avenues.

For more than a decade, city officials have aggressively encouraged development, offering incentives such as sales tax rebates, attracting new industry and retail trade to offset the decline in poker dollars.

Today, the Nisei merchants along Gardena Boulevard who were once the backbone of the Japanese American community are dwindling, as did the crops the immigrants once nurtured.

Gardena Inside Out

STRAWBERRY HOMAGE: The area where Strawberry Square shopping center stands at 1000 Rosecrans Ave. was referred to as Strawberry Park around the turn of the century. Residents held two-day strawberry festivals there, complete with parades. Today, 14 historical photographs transferred onto large tiles are embedded in the walls of Strawberry Square.

THE NAME CHANGE: In the late 1980s, landlocked Gardena and other South Bay cities decided they needed a serene marine image. City fathers changed Gardena’s segment of Compton Boulevard to Marine Avenue, hoping to link the city with the image of the affluent beach communities.

BEST FRIENDS’ CEMETERY: Located in the unincorporated Harbor Gateway strip, with a Gardena address, Pet Haven is the final resting place for more than 30,000 animals. It was created in 1948 by a pet owner who was upset that a lack of water at Los Angeles County’s other pet cemetery, in Calabasas, prevented him from growing grass on his dog’s grave. Gangster Mickey Cohen’s dog, Mickey Jr., and Lady, Little Joe’s horse on the “Bonanza” TV series, rest there. Some tombstones are marked with such epitaphs as “Nasty--Our Faithful Friend,” and “Sandy--1972-1988--I Know You Gave Me the Best 16 Years of Your Life.”

NO-NAME STUDIO: The only South Bay motion picture studio that made a big smash is now a junkyard on Vermont Avenue. Filmmaker Henry B. “Toby” Halicki used his unnamed five-acre Gardena studio, and often the city’s streets and sidewalks, to film epic car-crash scenes. He was killed at age 48 in an accident on the set while filming the sequel to his 1974 hit, “Gone in 60 Seconds.” That movie jump-started the studio by wrecking 97 cars in its 93 minutes and grossing $40 million worldwide on a $300,000 investment.

SPEEDWAY: Ascot Park opened in 1957 on a 37-acre dump site at 182nd Street and Vermont Avenue. Engine fumes, drifting dust and flying dirt clods were all part of the show that over the years included more than 5,000 racing events for motorcycles and sprint cars. It was the busiest dirt racetrack in the nation for 33 years before it came to the finish line in 1990.