There is an old story about Long Beach which says that decades ago the city was made up of two groups of people: the ones who owned ships and the ones who built them. And the ship owners lived in Bluff Park.
It could also be said that the two groups that made up Long Beach at an even earlier date were the people who owned the oil wells, and the ones who worked in the oil fields. Neither story is quite true, but they both serve to dramatize a little about the extreme variation in Long Beach neighborhoods. Bluff Park is at the high end.
An affluent neighborhood overlooking the beach
Today, Bluff Park is a narrow neighborhood — only three blocks wide — which lies west of Redondo between Broadway in Belmont Heights and Ocean Blvd. facing the beach. It is clearly one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Long Beach where the large homes on smallish lots rarely become available for sale.
In the 1960s when the rage for high rise condos first swept across America, Long Beach granted permission for the Galaxy Tower to be built on Ocean Blvd. near the edge of Bluff Park. After it rose skyward, the city planners changed their minds. It remains one of the few condo buildings and the only very tall one in the neighborhood. Most of the other high rise condos in Long Beach are closer to downtown.
As with many other neighborhoods in Long Beach, architectural preservation is a dominant characteristic of the area. The homes are large and within steps of the bluff where stairs lead down to the beach. Prices are correspondingly high.
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