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The city derives its name from a mispronunciation of belle
fleur, a variety of apple tree. Originally settled by dairy farmers of Dutch,
Japanese, and Portuguese descent, Bellflower and neighboring Paramount served
as the milk production centers for Southern California until soaring post-World
War II property values motivated most of the farmers to move several miles east
to the Dairy Valley/Dairyland area (now the cities of Cerritos and La Palma).
Seemingly overnight, the city's pastures and farms were replaced by sprawling
subdivisions of inexpensive, largely prefabricated single-story houses. In the
1950s and 1960s, Bellflower Boulevard, the city's main thoroughfare, was a
thriving commercial strip. However, suburban growth and appraisals in Orange
County and the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys made Bellflower's
relatively humble housing tracts decidedly unattractive, and by the 1990s much
of its original white population--and the businesses that served it--had left.
The departed Anglos were replaced by just about every ethnicity imaginable, to
the extent that the "A-B-C" region, formed by Bellflower and
neighboring Artesia and Cerritos, is considered one of the most ethnically and
linguistically diverse in the United States. Bellflower Boulevard has recovered
much of its previous business traffic, and is now lined with shops advertising
in two dozen languages.
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