Mike Kobeissi on the Town That Hosts JPL

Mike Kobeissi’s December 2022 WordPress profile of La Cañada Flintridge introduces the town through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then surveys its government, its climate, its gardens and the mountains above it.

The author calls the laboratory the country’s main center for robotic exploration of the solar system, and he returns to it several times as the town’s defining neighbor. The institution grew from modest beginnings. Caltech dates the founding of JPL to Halloween of 1936, when a small group led by the graduate student Frank Malina, with the self taught enthusiasts Jack Parsons and Edward Forman, tested homemade rocket motors in the Arroyo Seco.²

Government and setting

Much of the profile explains how the city is run. Voters fill the five council seats by plurality, for overlapping terms with an election every other year, and the council appoints the city manager, the treasurer and members of advisory boards. Each year it also picks one of its members to preside as mayor. The account of the mayor and the mayor pro tem is muddled in places, though the outline is clear. The Los Angeles Almanac adds that the city incorporated on December 8, 1976, and counted 20,573 residents in the 2020 Census, a little above the population the profile gives.¹

The author places the town in Los Angeles County along the northern edge of the San Rafael Hills, with its higher ground to the east. He describes the weather as mild and much like that of other valleys away from the Southern California coast, with roughly 22 inches of rain in a year, and he notes a semirural character marked by riding and hiking traditions and plenty of parks. Its houses, he writes, are mostly single family, with a scattering of Spanish style villas.

Gardens, telescope and forest

Descanso Gardens is the profile’s main attraction for visitors, with events through the seasons. According to the Cultural Landscape Foundation, the publisher E. Manchester Boddy bought the land in 1937, planted it with tens of thousands of camellias under the oaks, sold it to Los Angeles County in 1953, and saw it listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.³

The profile also mentions public talks that let visitors look through a telescope with a 100 inch mirror, the Hooker instrument at Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above town. The Los Angeles Times marked its centennial in 2017, recalling that it gathered its earliest light in November 1917 and that Edwin Hubble’s work on the mountain showed the universe extends far beyond the Milky Way.⁴ The author closes the circle with the farmers market, nearby restaurants and the Verdugo Mountains and Angeles National Forest close at hand, the feel of a small town inside a very large metropolitan county, a place he presents as both historic and quietly scenic.