Editing Huntington Park, California (section)

== History ==
The first European to arrive to the area was Francisco Salvatore Lugo.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.hpca.gov/99/History#:~:text=In%201902%20to%20entice%20Henry,the%20name%20to%20Huntington%20Park | title=History of Huntington Park &#124; the Official Site of Huntington Park, CA! }}</ref>

[[File:Looking_north_on_Pacific_Boulevard,_Huntington_Park,_southern_California,_1907_(CHS-5001).jpg|alt=A few 2-story commercial brick buildings are on each side of the dirt street with puddles from rain. A horse-drawn wagon and a man are in the street.|thumb|left|Looking north on Pacific Boulevard, 1907]]

Named for prominent industrialist [[Henry E. Huntington]], Huntington Park was incorporated in 1906 as a [[streetcar suburb]] on the [[Los Angeles Railway]] 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, California|Vernon]] and [[Commerce, California|Commerce]].<ref>[https://www.census.gov https://www.census.gov]  ''Factfinder.census.gov''</ref>  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 being the retail hub of [[Southeast Los Angeles County]]. 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, California|Orange County]], the eastern [[San Gabriel Valley|San Gabriel]], western [[San Fernando Valley|San Fernando]] and [[Conejo Valley|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 [[Hispanic and Latino Americans|Latino]]s: upwardly mobile families eager to leave the barrios of [[East Los Angeles]], and recent [[Mexico|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—only now targeting a Hispanic public with many signs in Spanish.