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Old Posted Sep 25, 2020, 2:50 PM
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sopas ej sopas ej is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: South Pasadena, California
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Los Angeles has quite a few; the big ones that pop out in my mind are Pasadena, Glendale, and Long Beach, all founded in the 19th Century (though Glendale incorporated as a city in 1906), but many of the towns surrounding Los Angeles started out independently from Los Angeles. Some of them were bona fide agricultural towns, and some of them started out as real estate developments that were in cahoots with the expanding Pacific Electric streetcar system.

Some of these small towns had aspirations of becoming bigger cities, though, even bigger than Los Angeles. Alhambra is one of them. The context is that in the late 1880s, though LA was the county seat of LA County, it still basically was a small town amidst agriculture. Alhambra wanted to create a "Greater Alhambra," and early on started annexing land, and wanted to create a sewer farm outside of its city limits; the people living next to the sewer farm said "Oh HELLZ no" and that's how the cities of Monterey Park and Montebello were created; their incorporations prevented the sewer farm from being built.

Long Beach also started annexing land, and did those sneaky "shoestring annexations," which would encircle large acreages of undeveloped land or agricultural land. When the Lakewood Park Corporation started building acres of tract homes on a former lima bean field encircled by some of Long Beach's shoestrings, Long Beach had plans to annex that development, but instead, the residents formed the city of Lakewood. Pasadena also did somewhat of a shoestring annexation into the mountains north of it, to insure sources of water (many communities allowed themselves to be annexed by the city of LA to access LA's DWP water). Here's Pasadena's city limits; you can see two sections that snake up into the San Gabriel Mountains: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pa....1445155?hl=en

Of course in the early 1900s, LA did a shoestring annexation so that it could annex San Pedro for the Port of Los Angeles.

Shoestring annexations were made illegal in California in the 1950s, after 2 very notable shoestring annexations: Santa Barbara did a shoestring to annex its airport, and San Diego did it to annex San Ysidro, to be on the international border. What makes these shoestring annexations particularly notable is that the shoestring goes under water!

Santa Barbara:

ahstamant.com

San Diego; the shoestring goes through San Diego Bay:

sandiego.gov
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