Ten miles east of downtown Los Angeles, on a grassy rise in a quiet city park, stand eight white concrete arches reaching seventy-five feet into the sky. They are the first thing most people learn about the Armenians in Montebello, California, and for good reason. Every April the lawns below them fill with thousands of mourners. But the monument is only the visible part of a much older story, one that begins decades before the columns were poured, in a farming town that became the first Armenian suburb in Southern California.
The Place
Montebello sits in the southeastern corner of Los Angeles County, a city of roughly 62,000 people pressed between East Los Angeles, Pico Rivera and the Rio Hondo. Its history runs deep. The Spanish built the second mission in Alta California nearby in 1771, and the town that grew here was first called Newmark, after the Los Angeles merchant Harris Newmark, who helped turn the land into farming plots around 1899.
For decades Montebello was orchards and flower fields, famous enough for its blooms that the city seal still carries a red poinsettia. It incorporated in 1920, and through the mid-twentieth century it drew a steady stream of working families looking for a foothold near the factories and aerospace plants of southeast Los Angeles County.
Today Montebello is a working, predominantly Latino city, with close to eighty percent of residents identifying as of Latino descent according to the 2020 census. But its identity has long been shaped by three communities woven together over a century: Mexican American, Japanese American and Armenian. Of the three, the Armenian story is the least expected, and in some ways the most consequential for the wider region.
How It Became Armenian
The Armenian story in Southern California is usually told through Glendale, the city most people now picture when they think of Armenian Los Angeles. But Glendale’s transformation came later. The earliest Armenian suburb took root here in Montebello, and it did so for reasons that had little to do with the genocide that drove the Fresno settlers north of here decades earlier.
The Displaced Persons, 1947 onward
Montebello’s founding Armenian families were largely Displaced Persons: survivors and descendants of survivors who had been scattered across Europe and the Soviet sphere after the First World War, then uprooted again by the Second. Many spent years in camps in Germany before the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 opened a path to the United States.
They came through Ellis Island, then crossed the country to California. By the early 1950s a recognisable Armenian community had settled in Montebello, drawn by affordable housing, available factory and aerospace work in the region, and the simple gravity of family following family. Once a few households put down roots, others followed, and a neighbourhood formed.
The chef and humanitarian George Mardikian, a San Francisco restaurateur who had fled the Ottoman Empire as a young man, is widely credited with helping resettle Armenian Displaced Persons in California through his relief work, lending the early Montebello community both visibility and a champion.
Among those early arrivals were figures who became quiet anchors of community life. Jora Makarian, remembered as a world-renowned dance instructor, settled here with his wife Elena and taught a generation of Montebello children the folk dances their grandparents had carried out of the old country. In a refugee community, a dance step or a hymn or a recipe was not nostalgia. It was inheritance, the part of a homeland that fit in a suitcase and could survive a camp.
Building the institutions
What makes Montebello remarkable is the speed with which a refugee community built lasting institutions. The Holy Cross Armenian parish actually traces its origins to 1922, when the Armenians of Los Angeles, as the prelate later put it, deemed it a matter of survival to establish a church. The parish moved several times across the decades before the community finally put down its permanent stake in Montebello.
Education came next, and early. The Armenian Mesrobian School began as a Saturday school in the early 1950s and grew into a full institution in 1965, becoming the first Armenian high school in the United States. For a community that had been scattered across continents, a school that taught the language to every child, regardless of background, was a deliberate act of preservation.
The monument, 1968
The defining moment came after 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide. The Armenian community of Los Angeles resolved to build a permanent memorial, and Montebello, by then the established Armenian centre of the region, was chosen as the site. The Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument opened in Bicknell Park on 21 April 1968, designed by the architect Hrant Agbabian and funded by Armenians around the world at a cost of around 125,000 dollars.
The dedication drew more than ten thousand people. Among them was a young state senator named George Deukmejian, the future governor of California, who read out a proclamation from Governor Ronald Reagan. For a community that had been told for half a century that the world would forget, the columns rising over Montebello were a public refusal to let that happen.
Glendale and the later waves
From the 1970s onward, much larger waves of Armenians arrived in Los Angeles, from Lebanon, Iran, Syria and the Soviet Union, and many settled in Glendale and Pasadena, which grew into the demographic heart of Armenian California. Montebello’s community, older and smaller, did not expand at the same pace. But it had already done something the newer enclaves had not: it had built the first monument, the first high school, the institutional bedrock that the whole region would lean on.
The Landmarks
Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument, Bicknell Park, Montebello. Eight white arches on seventy-five-foot columns, the oldest and largest genocide memorial in the United States. Its inscription dedicates it to the 1,500,000 Armenian victims of the genocide of 1915 to 1921. In February 2025 the California State Historical Resources Commission voted unanimously to designate it a State Historical Landmark.
Holy Cross Armenian Apostolic Cathedral, 900 W Lincoln Ave, Montebello. The cathedral of the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America. The present building was consecrated on 11 November 1984 by Karekin II of the Great House of Cilicia, who would later become Catholicos of All Armenians. It even appeared on screen, standing in as a wedding church in the 2004 film Sideways.
Armenian Mesrobian School, 8420 Beverly Rd, Pico Rivera. Founded as a Saturday school in the early 1950s and chartered in 1965 as the first Armenian high school in the country. Tied to the Holy Cross parish, it teaches kindergarten through twelfth grade and requires Armenian language study of every student. Its pupils march to the Montebello monument each April.
Baghramian Hall, Lincoln Avenue, Montebello. The community hall on the Holy Cross cathedral grounds, the gathering place for banquets, lectures, fundraisers and the rituals of community life that hold an immigrant population together across generations.
The Holy Cross Armenian Food Fair, held each May. The parish’s annual festival of food and music on the cathedral grounds, where the kitchens turn out lahmajoun, kebab and pastries, and a community that began in displaced persons camps gathers to feed its neighbours.
Bicknell Park, Montebello. Beyond the monument, the park itself has become sacred ground for Armenian Los Angeles. On 24 April every year, thousands gather here for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, laying flowers at the base of the columns alongside California politicians.
Where They Came From
Montebello’s Armenians did not arrive directly from a single homeland the way many immigrant communities did. They came by way of exile. Their grandparents had survived the genocide in the old Ottoman territories, then been scattered into the Soviet Union, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
The Second World War uprooted them again. Many of the Displaced Persons who reached Montebello had spent the late 1940s in resettlement camps in Germany before sailing for America. This sets the community apart from the Armenians of Fresno, who came earlier and directly from the Ottoman Empire to farm the Central Valley.
It was a community defined less by a place of origin than by a shared experience of having been moved, repeatedly, against its will. That history is exactly why the monument matters so much to them.
Montebello Today
Montebello in 2026 is a majority-Latino city, and the Armenian community here is no longer the dominant cultural presence it once was. Many descendants of the founding families have moved on to Glendale, Pasadena, La Crescenta and the suburbs further north and east, following the larger Armenian Los Angeles centred up the 134 freeway.
But the institutions endure. Holy Cross is still a cathedral, Mesrobian is still graduating classes, and the May food fair still draws crowds. The community that remains is older and rooted, the keeper of a founding story that the much larger enclaves to the north sometimes overlook.
And once a year, on the twenty-fourth of April, the question of who came first becomes irrelevant. Armenians from across Southern California, from Glendale and Pasadena and beyond, converge on Bicknell Park. They come to the oldest monument, in the oldest suburb, to stand together under eight white arches and refuse, once more, to be forgotten.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Montebello significant to Armenians in Southern California?
Montebello is home to the oldest Armenian community in Los Angeles County and was the first Armenian suburb in Southern California, settled by Displaced Persons in the early 1950s. The Armenians in Montebello built the region’s first Armenian high school and its most important genocide memorial.
What is the Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument?
It is a 75-foot memorial of eight white concrete arches in Bicknell Park, Montebello, opened in 1968 and designed by Hrant Agbabian. It is the oldest and largest Armenian genocide memorial in the United States and was named a California State Historical Landmark in 2025.
When did Armenians first settle in Montebello?
A recognisable Armenian community formed in Montebello in the early 1950s, made up largely of Displaced Persons who had survived the upheavals of the Second World War in Europe before immigrating to the United States through Ellis Island.
What Armenian churches and schools are in Montebello?
The main institutions are the Holy Cross Armenian Apostolic Cathedral on West Lincoln Avenue, the cathedral of the Western Prelacy, and the Armenian Mesrobian School, the first Armenian high school in the United States, founded in 1965 and tied to the parish.
How are the Armenians in Montebello connected to Glendale?
Montebello came first, settling decades before Glendale became the demographic centre of Armenian California in the 1970s and 1980s. Many descendants of Montebello’s founding families later moved north to Glendale and Pasadena, but the older Montebello institutions remain.
What happens at the monument on April 24?
Every 24 April, on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, thousands of Armenians from across Greater Los Angeles gather at the Montebello monument in Bicknell Park, alongside California politicians, to lay flowers and honour the victims of the genocide.
If your family’s story passed through Montebello, or any of the places Armenians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a displaced persons camp in postwar Germany, to eight white arches over a park in Montebello, to wherever you are now.