Alondra Park

Just to the west of Gardenia, is the small Alondra Park neighborhood. Besides the park where it derives its name, Alondra Park’s main features are the golf course and El Camino College—abbreviated ECC by students and locals alike. ECC is a community college that serves as a preparatory school for many of the local four year colleges (like UCLA), with which it has transfer agreements. Because Alondra Park is not well known, ECC is usually listed as being in neighboring Torrance. The campus is attractive for a community college and the education is pretty good.

Unfortunately, Alondra Park’s middle class residents don’t have public schools to equal ECC’s strong record. Leuzinger High has, like many schools in the area, the worst ratings in the area with an API of 1 (of 10) and average SAT scores well below the national average. In addition, only a quarter of Leuzinger students pass the STAR test in English and only 10% in math. Leuzinger’s No Child Left Behind standards are even worse. It regularly fails to pass half the standards; last year it was even bad by its low standards, failing to pass 19 of the 22 standards. Truly awful.

There is a charter school in the area as well, for those that can manage to escape Leuzinger, but it only manages to achieve mediocrity with an API of 5, SAT scores well below average, only 15% passing the STAR math, and 50% the STAR English, and only one year in the last four did it pass all of the No Child Left Behind standards.

To the west of the college is Alondra Park itself and the Alondra Golf Course, a huge sprawling grounds that takes up a full quarter of Alondra Park’s area.

North of the college and golf course, the rest of Alondra Park is a residential area packed with hyper-symmetrical tract homes dating from the Baby Boom era. These are the kind of homes that were carefully parceled out and probably built by one contracting company so that each lot is exactly the same size and dimensions as its neighbor. It is stunningly exact—almost cubist really. Despite this, the actual homes, even though they are all standard Ranch homes, achieve some individuation by having slightly different layouts and décor. Residents have further differentiated their dwellings through fencing, decorative patterns on driveways and varieties of front lawn topiary—palm trees and bushy hedges being the favorites. All in all, it reminds me—like many of the areas around here—of the Valley in the 70’s. As a matter of fact, if I were trying to get that feel for a movie, this is where I would go to get it.

If the city government could find a way to address the education problem in the schools and lower crime just a tad further, this neighborhood could actually start to thrive. Unfortunately, there seems to be little chance of this.