On a Saturday morning on Pacific Coast Highway, the parking lot at H Mart fills before the doors slide open, and the cars carry families who have driven down from the hills above Torrance for cold radish kimchi, live mackerel, and a tray of hotteok from the bakery counter. The Koreans in Torrance, California did not arrive to a blank slate. They settled into a planned industrial city that had already become one of the most Asian places in America, and they made the South Bay their own quietly, suburb by suburb, church by church.
The Place
Torrance sits in southwestern Los Angeles County, about twenty miles from downtown LA, with a mile and a half of beachfront on Santa Monica Bay. It was founded in 1912 by the developer Jared Sidney Torrance, who hired the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to lay out a model industrial town. The city incorporated in 1921.
It grew rich on industry: oil, steel, and then aerospace and the auto giants. By the 2020 census Torrance held 147,067 residents, with a median household income above $113,000 and Asian residents making up roughly 35 percent of the population. It is a city of wide boulevards, low strip malls, and famously good public schools, and for two generations it has been a magnet for Asian families who wanted the South Bay without the price of the beach cities.
How It Became Korean
An Asian city before the Koreans came
To understand Korean Torrance you have to understand Japanese Torrance first. Long before the Korean markets arrived, the South Bay held one of the largest Japanese American communities in the country, kin to the older enclaves like Japanese Sawtelle on the Westside. Torrance and neighbouring Gardena were among the few places in pre-war California where non-citizens could acquire property, and Japanese farming families put down roots in the flatlands.
That history mattered. When Toyota and then American Honda chose the South Bay for their American headquarters, one reason was the established Japanese neighbourhood next door in Gardena. The infrastructure of an Asian immigrant suburb, the grocers, the language schools, the churches, the restaurants that knew how to source the right ingredients, was already in place. Koreans arriving in the 1970s and 1980s stepped into a region that already understood them.
The aerospace decades
The engine of the South Bay was aerospace. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Northrop, TRW, Hughes, and the rest built their plants across nearby El Segundo, Hawthorne, Redondo Beach, and Inglewood, and the defence buildup of the Reagan years turned the region into one vast engineering campus. Torrance itself anchored the cluster with American Honda Motor Company, Robinson Helicopter, and Honeywell Aerospace.
Korean immigrants of that first big wave, many of them engineers and technicians who had trained in Seoul, found work they could do here. Others opened the small businesses that have always defined Korean American life in Los Angeles: dry cleaners, liquor stores, garment shops, and groceries. The garment trade in particular tied South Bay Korean families to the wholesale district downtown, and the paycheques bought houses in Torrance.
From Koreatown to the South Bay
The mother community sits twenty miles north. Koreatown in Los Angeles was where most of these families first landed, where the first churches and newspapers and banks were founded. Torrance became the place you moved when the children reached school age and you wanted a lawn, a garage, and a district whose test scores you could brag about.
That suburban second act repeated across the metro. Some families went south to Fullerton in Orange County, others to the foothills of La Crescenta. Torrance was the South Bay answer to the same question. By 1992, an estimated sixty percent of the South Bay’s Korean population had concentrated in Torrance and Gardena, and the markets and restaurants followed the customers down the freeway.
Churches as the spine
If aerospace was the economic spine of Korean Torrance, the church was its social one. Korean Protestant congregations multiplied across the South Bay through the 1980s, doing far more than Sunday worship: they ran weekend Korean-language schools for the second generation, brokered job leads, hosted the funerals and the wedding banquets, and gave new arrivals a circle of people who spoke the language.
Torrance First Presbyterian Church has run a Korean ministry since 1979, and its Korean school still meets on Crenshaw Boulevard. Multiply that one congregation by the dozens of Korean churches scattered through Torrance and Gardena and you have the quiet architecture that held the community together while its families spread out across the suburb.
The Landmarks
H Mart, 4340 Pacific Coast Highway. The anchor of Korean Torrance for the everyday shopper, the Korean grocery chain’s South Bay flagship is the place families drive to for banchan, live seafood, and a quick bowl of jajangmyeon from the food vendors inside. On weekends the lot is a slow ballet of minivans and grandparents.
BCD Tofu House, 1607 Sepulveda Boulevard. A branch of the soft-tofu chain born in LA’s Koreatown, BCD serves bubbling stone pots of soondubu jjigae with a spread of side dishes and a raw egg cracked in at the table. It runs late, and it is as close as Torrance comes to a Koreatown institution this far south.
Han Nam Chain Market World, 3030 West Sepulveda Boulevard. One of the older Korean grocery anchors in the city, Market World has fed South Bay families since long before H Mart arrived. Its presence on Sepulveda helped make that corridor the spine of Korean commercial Torrance.
Freshia Market, 2515 Torrance Boulevard. A neighbourhood Korean supermarket closer to the heart of the city, Freshia is the kind of mid-size grocer where the produce is sharp and the prepared-food counter does brisk lunchtime business with office workers and aerospace shift crews alike.
Torrance First Presbyterian Church Korean School, 1880 Crenshaw Boulevard. The Korean ministry here has been a fixture since 1979, and the weekend Korean school is where many second-generation children learn to read hangul. It is a working example of how the South Bay churches carried language and identity into a new generation.
Mitsuwa Marketplace, 21515 Western Avenue. A Japanese marketplace by name, Mitsuwa on Western Avenue functions as a shared pan-Asian hub, its food court and aisles drawing Korean and Japanese families alike. It sits on the same Western Avenue corridor that runs all the way up to Koreatown, a thread connecting the two communities.
West High School, 20401 Victor Street. The top-ranked of Torrance Unified’s four comprehensive high schools and a repeat winner of county academic decathlons, West High is exactly the sort of campus that drew Korean families to the city. For many parents, the school district was the whole reason for moving down from Koreatown.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of Torrance trace, like most of Korean Los Angeles, to the great migration that followed the United States Immigration Act of 1965, which lifted the old national-origin quotas. The first big wave came through the 1970s, driven partly by the political and economic uncertainty of South Korea in those years and pulled by American jobs and family-reunification visas.
Many came from Seoul and the dense cities of the south, educated and urban, and a striking share arrived with professional training that suited the engineering economy of the South Bay. Others came into the small-business world of grocery, garment, and service that Korean Los Angeles had already built. Torrance, with its aerospace plants, its corporate campuses, and its schools, gathered the families who had done well enough to leave the apartment blocks of Koreatown behind.
Torrance Today
Korean Torrance today is not a Koreatown. There is no single dense main street of neon signage and basement noraebang the way there is twenty miles north. It is a suburban community, spread through the city’s neighbourhoods and stitched together by the markets on Sepulveda and Pacific Coast Highway, the churches, and the schools.
That diffuseness is the point. The families who came here were buying out of density and into the suburb, and the second generation grew up bilingual, went to West and South and North High, and scattered into careers across Greater Los Angeles. The Korean cafes and barbecue houses along the commercial corridors are where they come back.
The mix is still shifting. Some of the original immigrant shop owners have aged out and sold up, while a newer professional generation, drawn by the same schools and the same proximity to the corporate campuses, keeps the community replenished. Korean cafes serving injeolmi toast and cold brew now sit a few doors down from the older tofu houses, a generational handover written into the storefronts.
The community shares the city, gracefully, with the older Japanese American population whose presence first made the South Bay an Asian region, and with a steady stream of newer arrivals. Torrance is not a museum of one immigration. It is a working suburb where a Korean grandmother, a Japanese American family that has been here four generations, and a young aerospace engineer can all stand in the same H Mart checkout line on a Saturday morning.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Torrance, California?
Koreans make up an estimated several percent of Torrance’s roughly 147,000 residents, part of an Asian population that is about 35 percent of the city. The Koreans in Torrance are concentrated alongside neighbouring Gardena, which together held an estimated sixty percent of the South Bay’s Korean population as of the early 1990s.
Why did Koreans settle in Torrance?
Korean families moved to Torrance for the same reasons other middle-class families did: strong public schools, aerospace and corporate jobs nearby, and an established Asian suburban infrastructure already built by the Japanese American community. Many were a suburban second wave moving south from Los Angeles Koreatown once their children reached school age.
Where are the best Korean markets and restaurants in Torrance?
The Korean commercial spine runs along Sepulveda Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. H Mart on Pacific Coast Highway is the major Korean grocery anchor, Han Nam Chain Market World and Freshia Market serve longtime residents, and BCD Tofu House on Sepulveda is a well-known soft-tofu restaurant.
What is the relationship between the Korean and Japanese communities in Torrance?
They coexist closely. The Japanese American community, one of the largest in the country, established the South Bay as an Asian region decades earlier, and that infrastructure of markets, schools, and corporate ties drew Korean families in. Shared spaces like Mitsuwa Marketplace on Western Avenue serve both communities.
How is Korean Torrance connected to Koreatown Los Angeles?
Closely. Most South Bay Korean families first landed in Koreatown in Los Angeles, where the first churches, banks, and businesses were founded, then moved south to Torrance for the suburbs and schools. Western Avenue physically links the two, running from Koreatown down toward the South Bay.
Are Torrance schools good for Korean families?
Yes, and they are a primary draw. Torrance Unified School District consistently ranks among the top California districts, and its high schools, especially West High, regularly place near the top of state rankings. Strong schools were a central reason Korean families chose Torrance over denser parts of Los Angeles.
If your family’s story passed through Torrance, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the apartment blocks of Seoul to a market run on Pacific Coast Highway, to wherever you are now.