Downtown Arcadia

Downtown Arcadia. History Lives Here. , Downtown Arcadia was born in 1887 with founder Elias J. "Lucky" Baldwin's Oakwood Hotel complimenting a new Santa Fe train station at First Avenue and Santa Clara Street. Expansion came with City incorporation in 1903 and again with the opening of Baldwin's 1907 Santa Anita Racetrack (on the site of today's Arcadia Regional Park), but the "sporting element” who patronized the city's many saloons often outnumbered actual residents. Dramatic change began shortly after the death of Mayor Baldwin in 1909. Horse racing was outlawed in California that same year, and in short order both the Oakwood and the track grandstand burned to the ground. Mayor Hiram Unruh, whose own home was on the southeast corner of First and Huntington, started a period of transformation for Arcadia that would see the city's first gas, electric and telephone services, a city-owned water system, a local bank, a local library, and even a float in the 1915 Rose Parade. An exclamation point was added in 1918 with the dedication of a two-story, white-columned City Hall that would dominate this historic northwest corner for the next thirty years. , In 1929, an innovative Drive-In Market (one of the first in the country) came to fruition at the southwest corner of the intersection. Amenities included a coffee shop, barber shop, meat market, grocery store, produce stand and, anchoring the corner, a gas or "filling" station. Historic Route 66 soon followed; With Huntington Drive now part of the official US highway system. A welcoming neon "Arcadia" sign was added by the Arcadia Chamber of Commerce in 1932, the same year Arcadia approved a request by Lucky Baldwin's daughter Anita for special zoning to operate a new racetrack in town. Horse racing had been re-legalized in California, and Anita Baldwin would eventually sell land to Dr. Charles Strub and associates for their 1934 Santa Anita Park. Bronze plaques that make up the Thoroughbred Racing Walk of Champions (first installations in 2014) emanate from this intersection today to pay tribute to the city's storied racing history. Vintage photographs below document the period when First Avenue at Huntington Drive was both the civic and the business center of Arcadia's downtown.