By the time you reach the corner of Brand Boulevard and Wilson, the sound has already given it away. A grandmother on a bench speaks Armenian into a phone. The bakery next door pulls lavash from a stone oven. Up the block, past a row of jewellery shops with names spelled in two alphabets, a car horn blares a snatch of a wedding song. This is Glendale, California, and on a Friday evening, it reads as the largest Armenian city on earth outside Armenia itself.
Roughly one in three people you pass here is Armenian. The 2020 Census put the figure near a third of the city’s residents, with community groups estimating closer to forty percent, somewhere between sixty-five and eighty thousand people whose families trace back, in one wave or another, to a homeland that has been losing and reclaiming itself for more than a hundred years.
What the rest of America calls a suburb of Los Angeles, Armenians call Փոքր Հայաստան. Little Armenia. Or, simply, home.
Glendale, The Place
Glendale sits eight miles north of downtown Los Angeles, pressed against the Verdugo Mountains on one side and the dry bed of the Los Angeles River on the other. To the west are Burbank and the San Fernando Valley. To the east, Pasadena. To the south, the Hollywood Hills.
The spine of the city is Brand Boulevard: mid-century banks, jewellery counters, restaurant patios, and the great glittering outdoor mall called the Americana at Brand. Glendale Avenue and Central Avenue run parallel a few blocks east and west. Past the boulevards, the housing thins into Spanish-style bungalows, post-war ranch homes, and apartment blocks built fast in the 1970s and 1980s to absorb a wave nobody quite saw coming.
It is, by Southern California standards, dense. By any other standard, suburban. And almost entirely walkable, which is part of why it became what it became.
How Glendale Became Armenian
Before the Armenians
Glendale was carved out of Rancho San Rafael, a Spanish land grant dating from 1784, and incorporated as a city in February 1906. The Pacific Electric Railroad had reached it two years earlier, and what followed was the standard Southern California arc. Citrus groves were paved over. Streetcar suburbs went up. Forest Lawn opened on a slope above the city and sold a particular vision of Christian American afterlife.
For most of its first sixty years, Glendale was almost entirely white, almost entirely Protestant, and famously inhospitable to anyone who was not. Into the 1960s, it was widely understood as a sundown town. Black, Jewish and Asian Americans were unwelcome after dark, sometimes by law, sometimes by the simple violence of social custom. Forest Lawn refused them entirely.
The first Armenian families arrived quietly inside this Glendale, beginning in the 1920s. Most were genocide survivors who had reached California by way of the eastern Mediterranean, often through Fresno first. They opened small businesses, kept a low profile and waited.
The Armenians Arrive
The wave that changed everything began in the late 1970s. In Beirut, civil war broke out in 1975 and shredded the Armenian quarter of Bourj Hammoud, which had been one of the great pillars of the diaspora since 1915. In Tehran, the 1979 revolution and the long Iran-Iraq war that followed pushed Armenian families out of Iran by the tens of thousands. The Iranian Armenians who had been comfortable Tehranis a decade earlier were suddenly looking for somewhere safer, somewhere with cousins, somewhere already half-built.
They chose Glendale for the reasons immigrants always choose a place. It was affordable. It had room. The schools were good. A small earlier generation of Armenian Americans was already there, just enough of an anchor to make landing possible. And it was an hour, on a clear day, from the Pacific Ocean.
By 1988, The New York Times was reporting a clear pattern. Middle Eastern Armenians, particularly from Iran and Lebanon, were concentrating in Glendale. Soviet Armenians were settling in Hollywood’s Little Armenia along Hollywood Boulevard. Within a decade, those streams would converge.
Glendale at Its Peak
On 7 December 1988, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake collapsed the cities of Spitak and Leninakan in Soviet Armenia. More than twenty-five thousand people died. Three years later, the Soviet Union dissolved, the lights went out across Armenia, and a brutal first war for Nagorno-Karabakh began.
An estimated seven hundred thousand Armenians left in the decade that followed. Many went to Russia. A great many came to California. By the early 1990s, Glendale’s Armenian community had overtaken Hollywood’s to become the largest in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and by 2000 the largest concentration of Armenians anywhere outside Yerevan itself.
The 2000 Census counted 65,343 Armenians in Glendale, more than double the figure from a decade earlier. Brand Boulevard, a tired shopping strip in the 1970s, filled with Armenian groceries, bakeries, accountants, dentists, jewellers and travel agents. Asbarez, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s daily newspaper, moved its operations to Glendale. So did the Western office of the Armenian National Committee of America. The Chamlian Armenian School, founded in 1975, grew into a full K-8 institution teaching curriculum in two Armenian dialects.
By the mid-1990s, three of Glendale’s five city council seats were held by Armenian Americans. A young deputy district attorney named Adam Schiff was elected to the State Senate in 1996 representing Glendale, then to Congress in 2000. He would spend the next two decades making formal US recognition of the Armenian Genocide his single most defining cause.
The Change
The wave has not stopped. In September 2020, the second Nagorno-Karabakh war erupted. In Glendale, streetlights were wrapped in red, blue and orange. Murals went up overnight on Brand Boulevard. Car caravans shut down the 134 Freeway. The Armenian-owned restaurants stayed open late and quietly collected for the front.
Three years later, in September 2023, the Republic of Artsakh was dissolved and more than one hundred thousand ethnic Armenians were forced from Nagorno-Karabakh in less than a week. A new and grieving cohort began turning up in Glendale, joining cousins, joining churches, joining whatever foothold the city would give them.
Recent arrivals from the Republic of Armenia itself have added another layer, particularly young families who left during the political crises of the 2020s. The cohorts now overlap inside a single classroom, a single church pew, a single dinner table. The grandchildren of 1915 genocide survivors sit beside the grandchildren of Beirut shopkeepers and the children of Yerevan engineers, all of them speaking a fluent Glendale English in which the word “հայ”, meaning Armenian, does most of the heavy lifting.
The Landmarks of Armenian Glendale
St. Mary’s Armenian Apostolic Church (500 South Central Avenue). Founded in 1975 as the Iranian and Lebanese Armenian families began arriving in numbers, St. Mary’s sits a block off Brand and operates as one of the spiritual anchors of the city. The original building was small. By 1985 the community had outgrown it, and the present complex on Central Avenue serves liturgies in Armenian, English and Russian. In the courtyard stands a khachkar, an Armenian carved stone cross, dedicated in 2000 to the victims of 1915.
The Armenian American Museum and Cultural Center (Central Park, downtown Glendale). A long-promised, long-debated project now rising in concrete and steel at the centre of Glendale’s Central Park. The 58,000 square-foot building, due to complete in late 2026, is sheathed in an engraved steel facade designed by the architectural metalworker Zahner. Read one way, the pattern evokes Mount Ararat. Read another, the Verdugo Mountains that ring the city. It will house exhibition galleries, an auditorium and the permanent record of an American community that, until now, has had no monument of its own scale.
Mini Kabob (313 1/2 Vine Street). A six-stool kebab counter in a former doughnut shop, two minutes west of Brand. Founded in 1987 by a Persian Armenian named Ara, it was taken over in 1997 by Ovakim and Alvard Martirosyan, who arrived from Armenia with their family recipes and almost nothing else. Their son Armen now runs it. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times have both named it one of the best restaurants in the country. The dining room is still six stools.
Carousel Restaurant (304 North Brand Boulevard). The Tcholakian family ran a sandwich shop in Beirut until the Lebanese civil war drove them out in the late 1970s. Greg and Rose opened the first Carousel in a back corner of Hollywood’s Hye Plaza in December 1983, and their son Mike opened the bigger Glendale branch in December 1998, near the Alex Theatre. Three generations on, it remains the city’s standard for Armenian-Lebanese cooking: charred kebabs, raw kibbeh, sarma, and a meze table that does not end.
Raffi’s Place (211 East Broadway). Opened in December 1993 by Rafik and Gohar Bakijanian, who had brought their Persian-Armenian cooking out of Iran a few years earlier. The courtyard, strung with lights and shaded by trees, is the place where wedding parties, baptism dinners and Saturday family lunches happen in plain sight. Famous, justly, for kabobs.
The Alex Theatre (216 North Brand Boulevard). Not Armenian by founding: it opened in 1925 as a vaudeville house. But Armenian by adoption. The City of Glendale’s annual genocide commemoration fills its 1,400 seats every April, and the theatre regularly hosts diaspora film premieres and political rallies.
Glendale Central Library (222 East Harvard Street). The library houses the Armenian Genocide Memorial Collection, inaugurated on 21 April 2003 and now one of the most substantial publicly accessible archives on the genocide outside Armenia. It is also where the city’s Armenian-language reading programmes for children meet, and where, on April 24 every year, students lay candles in the lobby.
Where the Glendale Armenians Came From
Trace a Glendale Armenian family back far enough and the map almost always passes through somewhere that is no longer there. The Anatolian provinces of the former Ottoman Empire, Mush, Van, Erzurum, Sasun, Kharpert, Aintab, Cilicia, were emptied of their Armenian populations between 1915 and 1923. The survivors regrouped where they could: Aleppo, Beirut, Cairo, Tehran, Istanbul, and the new Soviet republic of Armenia in the south Caucasus.
Most of Glendale’s earlier wave is Western Armenian by origin and Middle Eastern by route. Their grandparents fled Anatolia for Aleppo or Beirut. Their parents grew up in Bourj Hammoud or in the Armenian quarter of Tehran. They themselves arrived in Glendale between 1975 and 1990, speaking a dialect of Armenian extinct from the land it was named after.
The later wave is mostly Eastern Armenian and came directly from the Republic of Armenia: Yerevan, Gyumri, Vanadzor. Most arrived after the 1988 Spitak earthquake, the 1991 Soviet collapse, and the wars that followed. Their Armenian sounds different. The cultural references differ. The shared language is grief, and increasingly a shared American childhood.
Religion is overwhelmingly Armenian Apostolic Christian, the ancient church that has held the community together since the year 301. Smaller Armenian Catholic and Armenian Protestant congregations also operate in the city.
Glendale Today
Walk Brand Boulevard on a weekday morning in 2026 and the city presents itself in layers. There is the corporate Glendale of glass office towers, DreamWorks Animation, and the cluster of insurance companies that anchor the tax base. There is the consumer Glendale of the Americana at Brand, Caruso’s open-air shopping centre that opened in 2008. And there is the Armenian Glendale that runs under and around both.
The schools are roughly half Armenian by enrolment. Glendale Unified closes for April 24 every year. The City Council still has Armenian American members in most cycles. The Armenian National Committee of America’s Western Region office sits on Brand. Asbarez files daily copy a few blocks away. Armenian-language radio broadcasts from within the city limits.
It is not a single community. A grandchild of a 1915 survivor who grew up in Beirut and arrived in Glendale in 1980 does not have the same life, politics, religion or accent as a recent arrival from Stepanakert displaced by the 2023 war. They share a language family and a memory of loss. They are, more and more, also sharing a city.
Other Roots stories on Atlas of Home trace nearby Californian heritage neighbourhoods: the Vietnamese in Little Saigon, Westminster and the Japanese in Japantown, San Francisco. Glendale belongs in the same conversation: an immigrant community that reshaped its host city in the process of making a home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Armenians settle in Glendale?
Armenians first settled in Glendale in small numbers in the 1920s, but the major waves came in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Lebanese civil war and the Iranian Revolution displaced large Armenian communities from Beirut and Tehran. Glendale offered affordable housing, good schools, and a small existing Armenian foothold to land on. The 1988 Spitak earthquake and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union then brought a second great wave directly from the Republic of Armenia.
Is Glendale still Armenian today?
Yes. The 2020 Census put Armenian-identifying residents at roughly a third of Glendale’s population, with community estimates running closer to forty percent. With roughly sixty-five to eighty thousand Armenian residents, Glendale remains the largest Armenian community outside Armenia itself, and the cultural and political centre of Armenian America.
What are the most famous Armenian landmarks in Glendale?
The most significant landmarks are St. Mary’s Armenian Apostolic Church on South Central Avenue, the Armenian American Museum and Cultural Center rising in Central Park, the Alex Theatre on Brand Boulevard where the annual genocide commemoration is held, and the Armenian Genocide Memorial Collection at the Glendale Central Library. Family-run restaurants like Mini Kabob, Carousel, and Raffi’s Place are everyday institutions of Armenian Glendale.
Where did the Glendale Armenians come from?
Most of the earlier wave are Western Armenians by origin: genocide survivors from the former Ottoman provinces of Mush, Van, Erzurum, Sasun, Kharpert, Aintab and Cilicia, who reached Glendale via Beirut, Tehran, Aleppo, Cairo or Istanbul. The later wave are Eastern Armenians from the Republic of Armenia itself, particularly Yerevan, Gyumri and Vanadzor, displaced by the 1988 earthquake, the Soviet collapse, and the two wars for Nagorno-Karabakh.
When did Armenians first arrive in Glendale?
The first Armenian families arrived in Glendale in the 1920s, mostly genocide survivors who reached California via Fresno. The community remained small until the late 1970s, when the Lebanese civil war and Iranian Revolution drove the first major wave. By the early 1990s, Glendale’s Armenian community had become the largest in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
If your family’s story passed through Glendale, or through Beirut or Tehran or Yerevan before it, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From the lost villages of Anatolia to the kitchens of Brand Boulevard, every road has a beginning.