California Citrus State Historic Park

A state park that is also a working orange grove. California Citrus covers 248 acres of Arlington Heights, a mile east of the 91, and the trees are not scenery — they are the exhibit. Navels, Valencias, grapefruit and lemons are grown, picked and sold here, in a collection of varieties second in the country only to the research groves at UC Riverside.

The park opened in August 1993, late enough that most of the groves it commemorates were already subdivisions. That is rather the point of it. Arlington Heights is the last substantial piece of the orange landscape left in a city that once ran on it, and the state bought the ground to keep a few hundred acres standing.

The Gage Canal still runs below the dam. Matthew Gage was an Irish watchmaker with no water engineering behind him who talked British investors into financing a canal across the dry benchland in the 1880s and made the heights plantable. The palm-lined roads over the knolls date from the 1920s, when this was money.

The visitor center opened in 2003, and the museum covers the growing, the packing and the cooperative that became Sunkist. What it has lacked is the other half. In 2022 the state put thirty million dollars toward a grove house, a packing house and a workers' bunkhouse, so the people who did the picking get a building too. Come in winter, when the fruit is on the trees.