Long Beach Basic Data

Long Beach
—  City  —
The City of Long Beach, California taken at 1200 feet AGL
Flag Seal
Nickname(s): LB, the LBC, Iowa by-the-sea
Motto: The International City
Location within Los Angeles County in the state of California
Long Beach Location in the United States
Coordinates: 33°48′15″N 118°9′29″W / 33.80417°N 118.15806°W / 33.80417; -118.15806 Coordinates: 33°48′15″N 118°9′29″W / 33.80417°N 118.15806°W / 33.80417; -118.15806
Country	United States
State	California
County	Los Angeles
Incorporated	December 13, 1897
Government
- Mayor	Bob Foster
- City Council	Robert Garcia Suja Lowenthal Gary DeLong Patrick O'Donnell Gerrie Schipske Dee Andrews Tonia Reyes Uranga Rae Gabelich Val Lerch
- City Attorney	Robert E. Shannon
- City Auditor	Laura L. Doud
- City Prosecutor	Tom Reeves
Area
- Total	65.9 sq mi (170.6 km)
- Land	50.0 sq mi (130.6 km)
- Water	15.9 sq mi (40.0 km)
Elevation	0 ft (Sea Level 0 m)
Population (January 1, 2009)
- Total	492,682 (38th)
- Density	9,770.6/sq mi (3,772.45/km)
Time zone	PST (UTC-8)
- Summer (DST)	PDT (UTC-7)
ZIP code	90801-90810, 90813-90815, 90822, 90831-90835, 90840, 90842, 90844-90848, 90853, 90888, 90899
Area code(s)	562, 310 (Only Some Small Areas Cover 310 Area Code)
FIPS code	06-43000
GNIS feature ID	1652747
Website	www.longbeach.gov

Photos of Long Beach and surrounding area

Long Beach History

Indigenous people have lived in coastal southern California for at least ten thousand years. Over the centuries, several successive cultures inhabited the present-day area of Long Beach. By the time Spanish explorers arrived in the 16th century, the dominant group were the Tongva people. They had at least three major settlements within the present day city boundaries. Tevaaxa'anga was an inland settlement near the Los Angeles River, while Ahwaanga and Povuu'nga were coastal villages. Along with other Tongva villages, they were forced to relocate in the mid 1800s due to missionization, political change, and a drastic drop in population from exposure to European diseases.

The Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos were divided from the larger Rancho Los Nietos, which had been granted by the Spanish Empire's, King Carlos III in 1784 to a Spanish soldier, Manuel Nieto. The boundary between the two ranchos ran through the center of Signal Hill on a southwest to northeast diagonal. A portion of western Long Beach was originally part of the Rancho San Pedro, and was in dispute for years, due to flooding changing the Los Angeles River boundary, between Juan Jose Dominguez and Manuel Nieto's ranchos.

Rancho Los Cerritos was bought in 1843 by Jonathan Temple, a Yankee who had come to California in 1827 . Soon after he built what is now known as the "Los Cerritos Ranch House", an adobe which still stands and is a National Historic Landmark. Temple created a thriving cattle ranch and prospered, becoming the wealthiest man in Los Angeles County. Both Temple and his ranch house played important local roles in the Mexican-American War.

Long Beach pier, 1905

Meanwhile, on an island in the San Pedro Bay, Mormon pioneers made an abortive attempt to establish a colony (as part of Brigham Young's plan to establish a continuous chain of settlements from the Pacific to Salt Lake).

In 1866 Temple sold Rancho Los Cerritos to the Northern California sheep-raising firm of Flint, Bixby & Co, which consisted of brothers Thomas and Benjamin Flint and their cousin Lewellyn Bixby, for $20,000. Two years previous Flint, Bixby & Co had also purchased along with Northern California associate James Irvine, three ranchos which would later become the city that bears Irvine's name. To manage Rancho Los Cerritos, the company selected Lewellyn's brother Jotham Bixby, the "Father of Long Beach", to manage their southern ranch, and three years later Jotham bought into the property and would later form the Bixby Land Company. In the 1870s as many as 30,000 sheep were kept at the ranch and sheared twice yearly to provide wool for trade. In 1880, Bixby sold 4,000 acres (16 km²) of the Rancho Los Cerritos to William E. Willmore, who subdivided it in hopes of creating a farm community, Willmore City. He failed and was bought out by a Los Angeles syndicate which called itself the "Long Beach Land and Water Company." They changed the name of the community to "Long Beach", which was incorporated as a city in 1888.

Long Beach boardwalk, 1907

Overlooked, but probably even more influential in the development of the city was another Bixby cousin, John W. Bixby. After first working for his cousins at Los Cerritos, J.W. Bixby then leased land at Rancho Los Alamitos, and then put together a group consisting of himself, mega-banker I.W. Hellman and Lewellyn and Jotham Bixby to purchase the rancho. In addition to bringing innovative farming methods to the Alamitos (which under Abel Stearns in the late 1850s and early 1860s was once the largest cattle ranch in America), J.W. Bixby began the development of the Alamitos' oceanfront property near the city's picturesque bluffs. Under the name Alamitos Land Company, J.W. Bixby named the streets and laid out the parks of his new city. This area would include Belmont Heights, Belmont Shore and Naples and would soon become a very thriving community of its own. Unfortunately, J.W. Bixby died in 1888 of apparent appendicitis, and the Rancho Los Alamitos property was split up with Hellman roughly getting the southern third, Jotham and Lewellyn the northern third and J.W. Bixby's wife and heirs keeping the central third. The Alamitos townsite was kept as a separate entity but it was basically run by Lewellyn and Jotham's Bixby Land Company.

When Jotham Bixby died in 1916 the remaining 3,500 acres (14 km²) of Rancho Los Cerritos was subdivided into the neighborhoods of Bixby Knolls, California Heights, North Long Beach and part of the city of Signal Hill.

Oil field in Long Beach, 1920

The town grew as a seaside resort with light agricultural uses. (The Pike was one of the most famous beachside amusement parks on the West coast from 1902 until the 1960s) and then as an oil, Navy, and port town. The town was once referred to as "Iowa by the sea," due to a large influx of people from that state and other states in the Midwest. Huge picnics for each state were a popular annual event in Long Beach until the 1960s.

Oil was discovered in 1921 on Signal Hill, which split off as a separate incorporated city shortly afterwards. The discovery of the Long Beach Oil Field, brought in by the gusher at the Alamitos No. 1 well, made Long Beach a major oil producer; in the 1920s the field was the most productive in the world. In 1932, the even larger Wilmington Oil Field – fourth-largest in the United States, and which is mostly in Long Beach – was developed, contributing to Long Beach's fame in the 1930s as an oil town.

The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 was a magnitude 6.3 earthquake that caused significant damage to the city and surrounding areas. Most of the damage occurred in unreinforced masonry buildings, especially schools. One hundred twenty people died in this earthquake.

The new Ford assembly plant in Long Beach, 1930

Long Beach was also the site of "The Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942", when observers for the Army Air Corps, reported shells being fired from the sea. Anti-aircraft batteries fired into the night sky, though no planes were ever sighted. Long Beach once had a sizable Japanese-American population mostly working in the fish canneries on Terminal Island and small truck farms in the area, but the Japanese and Japanese Americans were removed for internment in 1942, and most did not return after their release from the camps. Due to this, and other factors, they now make up less than 1% of the population of Long Beach. There is still a Japanese Community Center and a Japanese Buddhist Church in Long Beach. The Japanese-American Cultural Center is just over the Gerald Desmond Bridge and the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro.

The nonprofit Aquarium of the Pacific, located in Downtown Long Beach, opened to the public in 1998 and has since become a major attraction visited by more than 13 million people since its opening. The Aquarium was rated #2 Los Angeles area Family Destination in the most recent Zagat U.S. Family Travel Guide, second only to Disneyland. The Aquarium’s architecture is inspired by the towering, breaking waves of the Pacific and mirrors the fluid and dynamic temper of the ocean. Kajima International, developers of the world’s most critically acclaimed and technologically advanced aquariums, was the developer of the Aquarium of the Pacific and architects included the Los Angeles office of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassanbaum and Esherick Homsey Dodge and Davis of San Francisco. Construction was a joint venture of Turner Construction Company and Kajima International. The Aquarium of the Pacific recently made history as the first in the museum, zoo, or aquarium industry to become a Climate Action Leader for voluntarily measuring, certifying, and reporting its green house gas emissions to the Climate Action Registry and the public.

City Information

Never Married	(37.4%)
Married	(43.1%)
Separated (Married)	(3.5%)
Widowed	(5.8%)
Divorced	(10.2%)
Races
Hispanic	(35.8%)
White Non-Hispanic	(33.1%)
Other race	(20.6%)
Black	(14.9%)
Two or more races	(5.3%)
Other Asian	(4.8%)
Filipino	(4.0%)
Ancestries
German	(7.3%)
Irish	(6.0%)
English	(5.6%)
Italian	(2.9%)
United States	(2.3%)
Schooling
High School	(72.7%)
Bachelors	(23.9%)
Graduates	(8.2%)