Huntington Park, California

Huntington Park, California
General law city
City of Huntington Park
Pacific Boulevard and Clarendon Avenue, 2009
Seal
Location of Huntington Park in Los Angeles County, California
Huntington Park, California Location in the United States
Coordinates: 33°59′N 118°13′W / 33.983°N 118.217°W / 33.983; -118.217Coordinates: 33°59′N 118°13′W / 33.983°N 118.217°W / 33.983; -118.217
Country	United States
State	California
County	Los Angeles
Incorporated	September 1, 1906
Government
• Type	Council–manager
• Mayor	Graciela Ortiz
Area
• Total	3.016 sq mi (7.811 km2)
• Land	3.013 sq mi (7.802 km2)
• Water	0.003 sq mi (0.008 km2)  0.11%
Elevation	171 ft (52 m)
Population (April 1, 2010)
• Total	58,114
• Estimate (2013)	58,879
• Density	19,000/sq mi (7,400/km2)
Time zone	Pacific (UTC-8)
• Summer (DST)	PDT (UTC-7)
ZIP code	90255
Area code	323
FIPS code	06-36056
GNIS feature IDs	1660778, 2410079
Website	www.huntingtonpark.org

Huntington Park is a city in the Gateway Cities district of southeastern Los Angeles County, California.

As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 58,114, down from 61,348 at the 2000 census.

Named for prominent industrialist Henry E. Huntington, Huntington Park was incorporated in 1906 as a streetcar suburb for workers in the rapidly expanding industries to the southeast of downtown Los Angeles. To this day, about 30% of its residents work at factories in nearby Vernon and Commerce. The stretch of Pacific Boulevard in downtown Huntington Park was a major commercial district serving the city's largely working-class residents, as well as those of neighboring cities such as Bell, Cudahy, South Gate, and Downey. As with most of the other cities along the corridor stretching along the Los Angeles River to the south and southeast of downtown Los Angeles, Huntington Park was an almost exclusively white community during most of its history; Alameda Street and Slauson Avenue, which were fiercely defended segregation lines in the 1950s, separated it from black areas.

The changes that shaped Los Angeles from the late 1970s onward—the decline of American manufacturing that began in the 1970s; the rapid growth of newer suburbs in Orange County, the eastern San Gabriel, western San Fernando and Conejo valleys; the collapse of the aerospace and defense industry at the end of the Cold War; and the implosion of the Southern California real estate boom in the early 1990s—resulted in the wholesale departure of virtually all of the white population of Huntington Park by the mid-1990s. The vacuum was filled almost entirely by two groups of Latinos: upwardly mobile families eager to leave the barrios of East Los Angeles, and recent Mexican immigrants. Today, Pacific Boulevard is once again a thriving commercial strip, serving as a major retail center for working-class residents of southeastern Los Angeles County—but unlike its previous heyday of the 1930s, the signs along the avenue's storefronts are now primarily in Spanish.