Claremont Ca

Over the decades, the cultural center for Padua Hills has been an adobe-style theater hidden under mature olive trees at the top of Via Padova, which winds through the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in northeast Claremont. The eaves of the 75-year-old structure were charred a year ago when the Grand Prix fire marched across the hillsides. Beginnings A group of local citizens joined together in the late 1920s and purchased about 2,000 acres of hillside land.

The trolley doesn't come around here anymore. But when it did, it would arrive three days a week and circle downtown Claremont for 12 hours at a time. Around the apparel shops and gift boutiques, the art galleries and salons, the bakeries and cafes it would roll, stopping to pick up passengers free of charge. The trolley was more bus than streetcar, but it came with enough old-school charm that many hoped it would be an attraction that would increase business revenue and add to the small-town atmosphere of the area known as Claremont Village.

The City Council has denied an appeal from the owner of the Claremont Therapeutic Shiatsu Massage Parlor to renew its city operating license, shutting down the city's single massage parlor. City officials on Wednesday denied the owner's request based on municipal code violations at the business, which is in the 900 block of Foothill Boulevard, said Bridget Healy, assistant city manager.

The mother whose questioning of a Thanksgiving kindergarten tradition in Claremont resulted in the elimination of the children's handmade pilgrim and Native American costumes last month has received more than 250 hate e-mails, filled with misogynistic epithets, racist jeers and other abuse. One hoped that her daughter, a kindergartner, would get beaten up at school. Another celebrated genocide of Native Americans. Police are providing extra patrols at her home. And Michelle Raheja is at a loss.

People in Nancy Telford's hillside development above Claremont know that she's a top Century 21 real estate agent, ranked sixth in the nation and a proud Million Dollar Club award winner for high sales. They know it because around each Fourth of July weekend, she and her Realtor husband, Tom, place hundreds of white and yellow business cards touting her work affixed to small plastic American flags on her neighbors' front lawns in the upscale Claraboya neighborhood.

Amid piles of papers and backbreaking books in his La Verne home, chemistry instructor Richard McKee sits in his oak chair, trying to unlock secrets. Not the secrets of hydrocarbons or nucleotides--but the secrets of Claremont City Hall. This time, McKee is scouring his notes to figure out how to force the city to divulge a settlement of a recent federal court lawsuit. Last time, his cause was outing the private deliberations of his own colleagues at Pasadena City College.

The city of Claremont will restrict the type of documents the city releases, but will not limit how much time its staff spends on public document requests, the city manager said Wednesday. City Manager Glenn Southard is setting guidelines that he hopes will free staff time and reduce requests for public records, the volume of which he said borders on harassment. The number of document requests to the city nearly tripled in one year, he said.

City officials are upset about a California Regional Water Quality Control Board decision to allow a septic tank to be installed at a proposed board and care home. The board had initially voted to require a treatment plant at the planned Claremont Board and Care facility on West Baseline Road. But after complaints from the owner that a plant could cost up to $100,000, the board voted 5 to 3 this week to allow a septic tank.

For Claremont police, the events that transpired at a decorative duck pond outside a popular complex of retail outlets and restaurants remain a troubling puzzle. No one has been arrested. And police say they are not even sure if a crime was committed at Griswold's School House on Foothill Boulevard. But this much is certain: Fifteen to 20 ducks, many of them mallards, were apparently killed last Friday by two men armed with a pellet gun and a baseball bat. Police Cmdr. Richard A.

This time around, there was little call for a wrecking ball, and barely a bulldozer was needed. No bridges had collapsed, no city blocks were ablaze, no World Series was postponed. The Jaws of Life were held in reserve, awaiting the next freeway smashup. Call it the handyman's earthquake, more a fix-it job than a catastrophe. The Moderate One was made to order for a putty knife in the hands of a glazier, and a good excuse for do-it-yourselfers to stay home from work.

In Claremont -- the college town at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains where thousands of acres of citrus groves once thrived -- the locals have taken lemons and made lemonade. The booming citrus industry began in this leafy hamlet in 1887 when the Santa Fe Railroad arrived, but as tract housing supplanted citrus ranches in the early 1970s, the town's many packinghouses closed and were demolished. The College Heights Lemon Packing House, built in 1922 on the railroad tracks just west of Claremont Village, is the last one standing.

There may be a little less beauty in downtown Claremont if the City Council pushes through a restrictive ordinance on salons. Under the proposed ordinance, any new hair, nail, skin care, and tanning salons and day spas in Claremont Village would be restricted to second-floor or alley locations. Backers of the proposal said the rules are needed to prevent an over-concentration of beauty businesses in the downtown area.

Claremont and Pomona are a good hour's drive east from Westside art hubs, but they're nevertheless a destination for gallery hoppers. The two cities in the Pomona Valley can be a study in contrasts, with Claremont having been rated by Money magazine as the fifth best place to live in the U.S., while its southern neighbor has served as the butt of many a joke. But art, and convenient Metrolink stops, unite them.

Xavier Alvarez, the newest director of Three Valleys Municipal Water District in Claremont, had a personal story so harrowing he came to be known as the "Rambo" of the water board. He said he was a 25-year veteran of the Marine Corps. In 1979, he rescued the U.S. ambassador during the siege of the embassy in Tehran. He was shot twice, hanging from a helicopter, removing the American flag on the way out.

Were it not for the wildfire that gutted their Claremont house, Deb and Vern Jahnke still might be buying fixer-uppers, flipping them and then moving on to the next. After the Grand Prix fire of 2003 incinerated their 1948 post-and-beam home -- remodeled with lots of glass and wood-shingle siding -- the couple's first thought was to "sell the lot and get out of here," Deb recalled.

FOR as long as most Claremont old-timers can remember, the College Heights Lemon Packing House has been a fixture on First Street. Built along the railroad tracks in 1922, the corrugated metal structure was designed to store and pack huge quantities of fruit. With vast open spaces, iron trusses, saw-tooth skylights and a 400-foot loading dock, the building served its intended purpose for half a century.

Gov. George Deukmejian proclaimed a state of emergency in Los Angeles County as a result of $7.4 million in damage caused by the Feb. 28 earthquake. The proclamation is a legal prerequisite for a variety of disaster assistance programs and was requested by the county. The application said the cities of Claremont and Pomona each suffered $2.7 million in damage and that La Verne reported $1.4 million in damages.

In a brush-filled canyon north of Claremont, 54 workers are laboring around the clock to replace a pipeline that provides more than 1 million Inland Valley residents with water from Northern California. The effort began Sunday at midnight when workers shut off the 8-foot concrete pipe, severely limiting water to more than a dozen communities from Claremont east to Fontana. The pipeline also provides some water for 6 million people in Southern California.

Just east of L.A. is a New England college town, all pipe smoke and tweed and thoughtful walks along hushed side streets. More than 50% of residents hold bachelor's degrees, and you're as likely to hear young lovers discussing epistemic theories of truth as you are to see them smooching. The town grew up around the railroad tracks and Pomona College, which moved in 1889 from its nearby namesake into the Hotel Claremont.

People in Nancy Telford's hillside development above Claremont know that she's a top Century 21 real estate agent, ranked sixth in the nation and a proud Million Dollar Club award winner for high sales. They know it because around each Fourth of July weekend, she and her Realtor husband, Tom, place hundreds of white and yellow business cards touting her work affixed to small plastic American flags on her neighbors' front lawns in the upscale Claraboya neighborhood.