Bell Gardens is a city in the U.S. state of California in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Located in Los Angeles County, the city's population was 39,501 at the 2020 census. Bell Gardens is part of the Gateway Cities Region, a largely urbanized region located in southeastern Los Angeles County.
Bell Gardens is notable for being one of only six Los Angeles County cities (out of 88 total) to permit casino gambling and for being home of the oldest building in Los Angeles County.
Bell Gardens is named after James George Bell, an American businessman. The “Gardens” in its name derives from the many Japanese who, early in Bell Gardens’ existence, established vegetable gardens and rice fields. The adjacent city of Bell is also named after James George Bell.
History
Tongva
The area of Bell Gardens has a history dating back thousands of years. The Tongva established settlements in the area, including the village of Chokishgna. The village prospered until the arrival of the Spanish, after which it came under the influence of Mission San Gabriel in 1771.
Spanish and Mexican
In the late 18th century, when the area was associated with a large amount of land situated along the lower basin of the Rio Hondo area in Los Angeles County, Bell Gardens was once a bustling agricultural center for Californios during the Spanish Empire, 1509–1823, the Mexican government, 1823–1848, and the United States, after the Mexican-American War concluded in 1848.
Among those early Spanish settlers was one of California's first families, the Lugos. While stationed at Mission San Antonio de Padua near Salinas, California, Francisco Lugo's son Antonio Maria Lugo was born in 1783. In 1810 Antonio Lugo, a 35-year-old corporal in the Spanish army, was given the Rancho San Antonio land grant. The land grant was a reward for his military service during the establishment of the Franciscan Missions in California while being the attendant of colonization for the area. Today, the grant includes the cities of Bell Gardens, Bell, Maywood, Vernon, Huntington Park, Walnut Park, Cudahy, South Gate, Lynwood and Commerce.
Antonio Lugo built several adobe homes within the boundaries of the Rancho San Antonio grant, and raised cattle. One of the adobe houses, built in 1795, is the oldest house in Los Angeles County and is still standing at 7000 Gage Avenue. Lugo was given a term as Mayor of Los Angeles. According to Dr. Roy Whitehead in his book Lugo, "Don Antonio Maria Lugo…rode around Los Angeles and his Rancho San Antonio in great splendor. He never adopted American dress, culture or language and still spoke only Spanish. He rode magnificent horses, sitting in his $1,500 silver trimmed saddle erect and stately, with his sword strapped to the saddle beneath his left leg…People knew him far and wide, and even the Indians sometimes named their children after him, as he was one Spanish Don that they admired." Antonio María Lugo died at the age of 85 in 1860.
American period
One of his nine children, Vicente Lugo, married and built a two-story adobe home in 1850, located at 6360 Gage Avenue. A daughter of Antonio Lugo married Stephen C. Foster, Mayor of Los Angeles in 1854, and lived in an adobe house just east of 6820 Foster Bridge Road, now a parking lot. A granddaughter of Antonio Lugo married Wallace Woodworth, an early-day merchant and civic leader in Los Angeles. Their eldest son, Joseph Woodworth, built a two-story colonial style house at 6820 Foster Bridge Road in 1924. The land's original adobe dwelling was built in 1795 and named Casa de Rancho San Antonio by Lugo. When Henry T. Gage, a lawyer who married Antonia Lugo's granddaughter Frances V. Rains, occupied the residence, he added two wings and redwood siding, installed bronze fireplaces, and imported expensive fabric wallpaper from France to serve as background for the Gage coat of arms, which enjoys a place of prominence in every room.
The Bell Gardens’ school system began in 1867 when the San Antonio School was built where Bell Gardens Elementary stands today. Area farmers sent their children to the San Antonio School, which was one of the earliest educational institutions in the County of Los Angeles.
Because of the rich soil, many Japanese immigrants are part of Bell Gardens’ early history. Japanese gardeners leased land and farmed to produce quality vegetables for the marketplace. Rice fields also mushroomed within the city limits of Bell Gardens. With some of the richest agricultural land in the country, Bell Gardens remained a farming community until the 1930s.
Beginning in the 1930s, cheap homes were constructed, filled largely by defense plant workers. Latinos moved here for work and some brought their small businesses. Thousands of Central Americans fleeing civil wars in the 1980s also came to the region and created small businesses and worked in the same service industry jobs.
By the 1990s, Colmar Elementary changed its name to Cesar E. Chavez Elementary and 85 percent of the residents of Bell Gardens were Hispanic.
By 2013, approximately 122,000 homeowners in the southeast were Latina/o; a region where, prior to 1965, families of color could not live due to restrictive covenants.
Gage Mansion
thumb|Lugo family members at their home in Bell Gardens
The oldest remaining house in Los Angeles City is the Avila Adobe located on Olvera Street (built in 1818). It is not, however, the oldest remaining house in Los Angeles County. Shane Kimbler, a Bell Gardens history enthusiast, wrote that early colonist Francisco Salvador Lugo and son Antonio María Lugo began construction in 1795 on what is now known as Casa de Rancho San Antonio or the Henry Gage Mansion. The house is located at 7000 East Gage Avenue in Bell Gardens. It was built to qualify the younger Lugo, a former Spanish colonial soldier, for a land grant from the Spanish crown. In 1810, Antonio María Lugo completed the house and received the grant, naming his new grant Rancho San Antonio. The ranch eventually grew to encompass , including what are now the cities of Bell Gardens, Commerce, and parts of Bell, Cudahy, Lynwood, Montebello, South Gate, Vernon and East Los Angeles. When California became part of the U.S. in 1850, Lugo, as did all recipients of Spanish/Mexican land grants, began losing portions of his land to the growing population of Anglo newcomers. The ranch adobe, however, continued to be owned and used by the Lugo family.
By 1865, most of the Lugo ranch, divided among five sons and three daughters, had been sold off for as little as a dollar per acre. The original adobe ranch home, however, remained in the family. In 1880, attorney Henry Tifft Gage, a transplant from Michigan, married one of Lugo's great-granddaughters, Francis "Fanny" Rains. The original adobe ranch home was given as a gift to Gage as a wedding dowry and it became known as the Gage Mansion. When Gage acquired the mansion he worked very extensively to restore the heritage farmhouse of early Los Angeles. In 1898, Gage was elected to become the 20th governor of California. He served in that office from 1899 to 1903. In 1910, he was appointed by President William Howard Taft to serve as U.S. Minister to Portugal. He resigned after only one year due to his wife's health problems. Gage lived in the abode ranch house until his death in 1924.
Bell Gardens maintains only a small portion of the original Lugo land grant, which is located at the site of the Casa Mobile home Park at 7000 Gage Ave. In 1991, the park's tenants, who own the land as well as Lugo's original dwelling, were successful in their efforts to have Casa de San Antonio named State Historical Monument No. 984. Their effort ensures that Don Antonio Maria Lugo's name and his historic home will be preserved for future generations of Bell Gardens residents and Californians. thumb|Casa Mobile Home co-op site of Henry Gage Mansion
A century later, the Gage Mansion was all that remained of the once great Rancho San Antonio. In 1983, the Casa Mobile Home Park, a cooperative of mobile home owners renting lots on the property, purchased the land and the house from their ailing landlord. Although they were aware of the historical significance of the old house, they had no means of maintaining it. In 1987, then Bell Gardens City Councilwoman Daina Daina began working to get the house listed on the state historical registry, making it eligible for maintenance grants. It is now listed as California Historical Site Number 984.
Indian Revival Church
In 1956, Assemblies of God evangelist Arthur Stoneking recognized this demographic shift and pioneered Indian Revival Center (now Indian Revival Church), a congregation for Native Americans in Bell Gardens. Stoneking, a member of the Winnebago tribe, had remarkable success in bringing together people from various tribes. Started as a home bible study, the congregation soon became the largest Native American congregation in Los Angeles. In 1990, there were 889 American Native Indian people living in Bell Gardens.
Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , over 99% of it land.
Bell Gardens is bordered by Bell and Cudahy on the west, Commerce on the north and northeast, Downey on the southeast, and South Gate on the southwest.
The city is about southeast of Downtown Los Angeles.