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There is a collection of twenty-five small cities – Bellflower, Norwalk, Downey, La Mirada, Pico Rivera, etc. – that sit north of Lakewood. Southern Californians refer to the area, generically, as Southeast L.A., but since the cities are located between glamorous Hollywood and Orange County’s surfing beaches, the communities refer to themselves as the “Gateway” cities because anyone who travels from Beverly Hills to Newport Beach passes through them like a gate.
But there is no gate. It’s all just freeways and soundwalls and billboards and concrete river channels and, truth be told, few people give the communities much thought. These are the fly-over cities of Southern California, out of mind until you need your compressor fixed or want something fabricated out of sheet metal. A million and a half people live here1, though – about four percent of all Californians – and if the region had incorporated as a single entity instead of twenty-five separate municipalities, the City of Gateway would be the seventh-largest city in the United States. Bigger than San Diego. Bigger than Dallas.