Claremont, California, United States

🇺🇸 Claremont is a suburban city on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, California, United States, 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is in the Pomona Valley, at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Claremont is home to the Claremont Colleges and other educational institutions, and the city is known for its tree-lined streets with numerous historic buildings. Because of this, it is sometimes referred to as "The City of Trees and Ph.Ds". It was named the best suburb in the West by Sunset Magazine in 2016, which described it as a "small city that blends worldly sophistication with small-town appeal". In 2018, Niche rated Claremont as the 17th best place to live in the Los Angeles area out of 658 communities it evaluated, based on crime, cost of living, job opportunities, and local amenities.

The city is primarily residential, with a significant portion of its commercial activity located in "The Village", a popular collection of street-front small stores, boutiques, art galleries, offices, and restaurants adjacent to and west of the Claremont Colleges. The Village was expanded in 2007, adding a controversial multi-use development that includes an indie cinema, a boutique hotel, retail space, offices, and a parking structure on the site of an old citrus packing plant west of Indian Hill Boulevard. Claremont also hosts several large retirement communities.

Claremont has been a winner of the National Arbor Day Association's Tree City USA award for 22 consecutive years. When the city incorporated in 1907, local citizens started what has become the city's tree-planting tradition. Claremont is one of the few remaining places in North America with American Elm trees that have not been exposed to Dutch elm disease. The stately trees line Indian Hill Boulevard in the vicinity of the city's Memorial Park.

History Prior to the establishment of the city of Claremont, the area was frequented by the Serrano, Cahuilla, and Tongva for thousands of years. The Tongva established villages in the area as early as 7000 B.C. and thrived from the freshwater of what the Spanish would call the San Antonio Creek. One well-documented Tongva village, known as Torojoatngna, was located at a place called "Indian Hill" by early American settlers. The village was active until the nineteenth century, housing nearly 200 residents in 1870, yet was eventually abandoned after being ravaged by a smallpox epidemic by 1883.

The city of Claremont was first mapped out by developers in a land boom precipitated by the arrival of transcontinental railroads to Southern California. It was likely named after Claremont, New Hampshire. The early history of the city was closely tied to that of Pomona College, which moved there in 1889. In 1902, a town meeting vote established that east–west streets would be numbered and north–south streets named after colleges and universities. The city was incorporated in 1907.

The citrus groves and open space which once dominated the northern portion of the city have been replaced by residential developments of large homes. Construction of Stone Canyon Preserve, one of the final residential tract developments in the north of the city, commenced in 2003 as part of a complicated agreement between Pomona and the City of Claremont which resulted in the creation of the 1,740-acre (7.0 km²) Wilderness Park. The foothill area also includes the Padua Hills Theatre (a historic site constructed in 1930) and the Claraboya residential area.

Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 13.35 square miles (34.6 km²), of which 13.3 square miles (34 km²) is land and 0.05 square miles (0.13 km²) (1.03%) is water. Claremont is located at the eastern end of Los Angeles County and borders the cities of Upland and Montclair in San Bernardino County, as well as the cities of Pomona and La Verne in Los Angeles County. It is geographically located in the Pomona Valley. Claremont is approximately 30 miles (48 km) east of downtown Los Angeles.

Economy: Top employers According to the city's 2009 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers in the city include: 1 Claremont Colleges; 2 Claremont Unified School District; 3 HiRel Connectors; 4 City of Claremont; 5 Claremont Auto Center; 6 Claremont Manor; 7 Technip Energies; 8 Pilgrim Place; 9 Indian Hill Nursing; 10 The Webb Schools.

Arts and culture Claremont has been praised for its vibrant arts and culture scene.

Each year, Claremont holds a springtime folk music festival, hosted by the Folk Music Center Store and Museum. The 35th event took place in May 2018.

Local museums include the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology at The Webb Schools (the only high school in the United States to own and host a nationally accredited museum on campus) and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College.

Each July, Ophelia's Jump Productions presents their annual Midsummer Shakespeare Festival at The Sontag Outdoor Theatre in Pomona College. Productions are performed in repertory with local community and civic events and festivities.

The Claremont Village hosts a Pie Day Festival every March 14. In past years, attendees could collect pie recipes as they walked around downtown Claremont and checked out different stores.

In 2019, Claremont made national news after the Claremont United Methodist Church unveiled a nativity scene depicting Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus separated and locked up in individual chain-link pens. This was done to reflect the plight of immigrants and asylum seekers on the U.S. Southern Border in 2019. The Church had constructed similarly non-traditional nativity scenes in prior years.

Points of interest • The Claremont Colleges • The California Botanic Garden (formerly Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden) contains a very large and diverse collection of California native plants, and is open daily for self-guided walking tours. • Padua Hills Theatre • Folk Music Center Museum • Claremont Museum of Art • Ophelia's Jump Theater • Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College

Education Private educational institutions host approximately 6,500 students every year from across the country and around the world. The Claremont Colleges, a consortium of seven schools of higher education, include five undergraduate institutions—Pomona College (founded in 1887), Scripps College (1926), Claremont McKenna College (1946), Harvey Mudd College (1955), and Pitzer College (1963)—and two graduate institutions—Claremont Graduate University (1925) and the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (1997). Many of these schools are consistently rated among the best in the nation.

Just north of Foothill Boulevard is the college-owned Robert J. Bernard Field Station, which preserves natural coastal sage scrub on its property. The Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Lincoln University, two other schools of higher education, share some resources with the Claremont Colleges, but are separate entities.

Media The Claremont Courier is widely regarded as Claremont's newspaper of record. In 2018, the Courier was named the top community newspaper in California by the California News Publisher's Association. In addition, Claremont High School's students produce the student newspaper The Wolfpacket, with support and printing services from the Courier.

There are also several media outlets based at the Claremont Colleges, including The Student Life, the oldest college newspaper in Southern California, and the radio station KSPC.

Transport Commuter train service to Claremont is provided by Metrolink from the Claremont Metrolink Station. The station is on the San Bernardino Line, with trains traveling to Los Angeles Union Station (west) and San Bernardino – Downtown (east) 19 times on weekdays (20 on Fridays), 10 times on Saturdays, and seven times on Sundays. Claremont's train station is known as the Claremont Depot.

Claremont will also connect with the Metro Gold Line once the Gold Line Foothill Extension is complete in 2026. This extension will also provide service to L.A. Union Station via Pasadena.

FlixBus utilizes a stop adjacent to the Claremont Metrolink Station.

The local transit bus service Foothill Transit covers Claremont and several other cities in the eastern San Gabriel Valley.