California Heights Has Been Throwing Its Houses A Rolling Birthday Party Since 2024

On September 19, the corner of California Avenue and 37th Street will fill up with folding tables, a photo booth, and whatever band the neighborhood association has booked this year. It is the third annual Centennial Celebration Block Party, running from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and it is built around a very specific number: 1926, the year a particular batch of houses on these blocks turned from lumber and stucco into finished homes.

Do the arithmetic on that word "third annual" and something interesting falls out. If this is year three, the first celebration happened in 2024, the year California Heights itself turned 100. That means the block party did not start as a one-off centennial bash. It started as a rolling count. 2024 covered the houses built in 1924. 2025 covered 1925. This September covers 1926. Most of the neighborhood's roughly 1,500 homes went up between 1924 and 1950, so if the pattern holds, this is a tradition with a long runway still ahead of it, one construction year at a time.

That detail matters more than it looks. It tells you something about how California Heights actually operates, which is not through a single splashy event but through a system built to keep running.

The Sixteen Years It Took To Fix The Lampposts

The vintage lampposts lining the Heights are the neighborhood's most photographed detail, and most residents who moved in over the last decade probably assume they are original 1920s hardware that simply survived. They are not. By the late 1990s, most of the original lamppost tops had been swapped out for plain yellowed plastic globes, and it was the threat of losing that detail entirely that helped push the neighborhood toward historic district status in the first place.

The idea to restore them began in 1998. Getting it done took sixteen years, in stages, funded almost entirely through grants from the Long Beach Navy Memorial Heritage Association and ticket receipts from the neighborhood's own Home and Garden Tour.

Add up the documented rounds and volunteers moved past 200 lamppost tops before the final 2014 push closed out whatever was left. The whole effort ran almost exactly as long as it took the original developers to finish building the neighborhood in the first place, a stretch of close to two decades from the early 1920s land boom to the last completed lots by 1939. The charm did not survive on its own. It was rebuilt, piece by piece, by residents writing checks and applying for grants for sixteen years straight.

The Trees Nobody Gets To Plant Themselves

The parkway trees that shade Cal Heights streets run into a quieter version of the same problem. They are technically city property, which means a resident cannot simply plant or remove one without going through the City of Long Beach's Department of Public Works, sticking to an approved species list, and pulling a permit.

That is where Cal Heights ReLeaf comes in. It is a volunteer group, meeting on an as-needed basis, that handles the paperwork and legwork of replanting parkway trees that have died or never gone in to begin with. If you have ever wondered why some stretches of the neighborhood have a full, even tree line and others have obvious gaps, ReLeaf is the answer either way. Where you see a full canopy, someone tracked down a permit and planted it. Where you see a gap, nobody has gotten to it yet.

The Home Tour Is Where The Money Actually Comes From

Both of those projects, the lampposts and the trees, along with the neighborhood's Clean Streets program and its mural work, get funded largely through one event: the annual Home and Garden Tour.

The tour has not run every single year. It came back in May 2024 as its 18th edition after a four-year hiatus, with docent-led walks through five restored homes and ticket prices of $35 in advance or $40 at the door. That gap matters for the same reason the lamppost timeline matters. When the tour does not happen, the funding for lampposts, trees, and street cleaning does not happen either. The 2012 Neighborhoods USA convention gave California Heights its "Neighborhood of the Year" award, plus first place in the Physical Revitalization category, specifically because of the tour and the projects it bankrolls.

The postcard version of California Heights, the lampposts, the tree canopy, the spotless curbs, is not something the neighborhood inherited. It is something residents fund every year through a walking tour of their own living rooms.

What Happens Between The Big Days

None of this runs only on annual events. Volunteers handle street clean-up every Thursday morning, and the neighborhood runs a monthly alley clean-up that doubles as an informal block party. "The Heights," the association's bi-monthly newsletter, is how most of this gets communicated between the bigger dates.

The commercial corridor along Atlantic Avenue fills in the rest of the week. Jongewaard's Bake n' Broil has been serving pie and quiche to the neighborhood since 1965. Steelcraft Long Beach rotates food vendors and craft brewers a short walk from the historic core. f/8 Studios and the California Heights Market anchor the stretch near Orange Avenue where Home Tour tickets get sold on the day of the event. Reservoir Park, the neighborhood's main patch of green space, had its playground refurbished recently, while the Pickleball Badminton Center on the east side of the neighborhood stays packed with regulars.

None of these places are why California Heights looks the way it does on a Sunday afternoon. They are simply what the neighborhood looks like while the slower work, the lampposts, the trees, the alley clean-ups, keeps happening in the background.

Mark The Date, Then Watch What Comes Next

If the arithmetic holds, this year's party for the class of 1926 will not be the last. Expect 2027 to bring a fourth annual celebration for the houses built in 1927, and so on, for as long as the neighborhood keeps counting.

For residents, the practical takeaway is simple. If you own one of the older homes in the district and you want a sense of when your own house might get its turn under the tent, the math is public: the association is currently two years into a count that started with 1924. If you are curious about how the neighborhood's preservation work gets funded, or you want to get involved before next May's Home Tour, the California Heights Neighborhood Association keeps its event calendar and volunteer sign-ups on its own site.

Perry Handy Homes works with owners across Long Beach's historic districts on the kind of renovation projects that keep century-old homes livable without losing what made them worth preserving in the first place. If you are weighing an update to a Cal Heights bungalow, whether that means matching original trim, navigating the district's Certificate of Appropriateness process, or simply understanding what a permitted change actually costs, schedule your free home valuation and renovation consultation and we will walk through it together.