A Castle In Suburbia

"Take the 10 Freeway east from downtown L.A., drive about eight miles in heavy traffic under increasingly sooty skies and you'll think you're nowhere special at all. Exit into Alhambra and you'll realize you're right -- and wrong. Alhambra, which is touted on signs as "the gateway to the San Gabriel Valley," is special in its aura of small-town simplicity. It is a community in slow motion, a mostly flat land with a few main thoroughfares that are lined with fast-food and auto repair stores, surrounded by miles of soothingly broad and quiet streets on which there are thousands of aging, neatly kept private homes.It is a city chosen by its residents precisely because so little happens there -- and there is less opportunity for trouble."

Thanks to Laura Kranz