Walk south on Brand Boulevard on a Saturday and you will hear Persian spoken at the bakery counter, see saffron and dried limes stacked in a grocer’s window, and smell grilled koobideh drifting out of a kebab house that has been there since 1993. The Persians in Glendale are part of one of the largest Iranian communities anywhere outside Iran, and they have woven themselves quietly into a city better known for its Armenians, many of whom, in fact, came from Iran too.
The Place
Glendale sits at the mouth of the Verdugo Mountains, just north of downtown Los Angeles and east of the San Fernando Valley. Founded in 1884 and incorporated in 1906, it earned the nickname the Jewel City from chamber of commerce president Edward U. Emery, who said it sparkled like a jewel in the sun.
Today it is a city of roughly 196,000 people, dense and walkable in its core, with a downtown anchored by the Glendale Galleria and the open-air Americana at Brand. More than half its residents are foreign born, and that fact, more than the mountains or the malls, explains the city you encounter today.
How It Became Persian
To understand the Iranians in Glendale, you have to understand who left Iran, and when. The story here is layered, and it begins not in 1979 but a little before.
Students and the boom years
In the 1960s and 1970s, Iran’s oil economy boomed. Revenues leapt from 4.4 billion dollars to 17.1 billion in the mid-1970s alone, and a prosperous professional class sent its children abroad to study. Southern California, with its universities and its weather, drew thousands of them.
These early arrivals were not refugees. They were affluent, educated, and mobile, and they came with intellectual and material resources that traditional immigrants rarely had. Many never intended to stay. Then 1979 changed the calculation.
1979 and the exodus
The Iranian Revolution of 1978 to 1979 and the founding of the Islamic Republic set off a migration that has not fully stopped. The Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, international sanctions, and the squeeze on religious minorities all pushed more people out. Greater Los Angeles became the gravitational centre of the diaspora, so much so that locals coined the name Tehrangeles for the dense Iranian quarter around Westwood.
California holds the largest Iranian American population in the country, and Southern California has been the centre of that world for more than four decades, beginning with the surge of the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to the historical record of Iranian Americans. Within that landscape, every town developed its own character.
Not everyone settled in Westwood. The wealthy and the secular gravitated toward Beverly Hills and the Westside. Others, especially those who arrived with less, looked east, across the hills, to Glendale. The choice was rarely abstract. It followed a relative who had already found an apartment, a job, a school, and a grocer who stocked the right rice.
The Iranian-Armenian thread
Here is the wrinkle that makes Glendale different from Westwood or Encino. A large share of the Iranians who came to Glendale were Iranian-Armenians, members of a Christian minority that had lived in Tehran, Tabriz, and Isfahan for centuries.
By 1979 there were around half a million Armenians in Iran. After the revolution, that number fell by roughly half. Those who left often did not come straight to California. They routed through Austria, Sweden, or Germany first, applying for refugee resettlement, then joined relatives in Glendale, where an Armenian community was already forming.
The two waves arrived differently. The Iranian-Armenians who came before 1979 had travelled with means and intention, often as students. Those who came after frequently had to leave everything behind and start over, a sharper break that shaped how they built their lives in California, as a University of California study of Armenian immigration to Southern California details.
The result is that Glendale’s Iranian story and its Armenian story are braided together. A family that speaks Armenian at home, keeps the Apostolic Church calendar, and still sets a Nowruz table for the Persian new year is not a contradiction here. It is common.
Muslims, Jews, and the wider community
Alongside the Iranian-Armenians came Iranian Muslims and Iranian Jews. The Persian Jewish community in Greater Los Angeles, centred on synagogues like Nessah, which Rabbi David Shofet founded in 1980 for refugees of the revolution, spread across the region, and Glendale drew its share of families who wanted good schools and a Persian-speaking commercial street within reach.
What united these very different groups was language, food, and habit. Whatever they prayed, they shopped at the same grocers, ate the same stews, and counted down to the same new year. A Muslim family from Tehran, a Jewish family from Shiraz, and an Armenian family from Isfahan might disagree on almost everything else, but they would all recognise the smell of basmati steaming with saffron, and they would all know that the new year does not begin in January.
That shared culture is what makes the Persian presence in Glendale legible even without a single official quarter. It lives in the commercial street, in the dinner table, and in the calendar, rather than in a banner across a boulevard.
The Landmarks
Raffi’s Place, 211 E Broadway. Open since 1993, Raffi’s is the institution. Its sprawling patio fills on weekend nights with large family tables, and its hand-seasoned, hand-grilled kebabs draw diners from across the region. The name is Armenian, the menu is Persian, and the crowd is both: Glendale on a plate.
Shamshiri Persian Grill, 122 W Stocker Street. Just off North Brand Boulevard near the Americana, Shamshiri has become a go-to for downtown Glendale’s Persian food, from charred kebabs to slow-cooked khoresh stews and freshly baked flatbread. It is the kind of place where the rice is judged seriously.
Shiraz, 211 S Glendale Avenue. Named for the city in southern Iran, Shiraz serves classic Persian cuisine a short walk from the Americana at Brand. It is a fixture of the south-of-downtown stretch where much of the Iranian commercial life clusters.
The Americana at Brand, Brand Boulevard. Rick Caruso’s open-air complex opened in May 2008 after a bruising legal fight with the neighbouring Glendale Galleria. For the city’s Iranian families it became the default Friday-night promenade, a place to stroll, to be seen, and to run into people from the old country.
Brand Boulevard, downtown Glendale. The city’s main north-south spine is the everyday stage for Iranian Glendale. Persian-language signage, jewellers, travel agents, and professional offices share the street with Armenian and Korean businesses, a working portrait of who actually lives here.
Crescenta Valley High School, La Crescenta. The most decorated of the Glendale Unified high schools, ranked in the top three per cent of American high schools by U.S. News in 2024, it is one of the reasons Iranian and Iranian-Armenian families have pushed north into the La Crescenta foothills. Education is the through-line of the whole migration.
Clark Magnet High School. A STEM-focused magnet that has ranked in the national top one per cent, Clark is the prize that ambitious immigrant families chase. In a community that came of age sending its children abroad to study, the local high schools have become the new university pipeline.
Where They Came From
The Iranians of Glendale trace back chiefly to Tehran, with significant roots in Tabriz and Isfahan, the historic centres of Iran’s Armenian and Jewish minorities as well as its Muslim majority. The pre-1979 wave came from the prosperous, educated stratum that profited from the oil boom.
The post-revolution waves were broader: families fleeing political and religious pressure, war, and economic collapse. The Iranian-Armenians among them often arrived by a roundabout European route, which is why so many Glendale households carry a layered passport history through Vienna or Stockholm.
The unifying pull was an established community. Once Glendale had Persian grocers, Persian-speaking doctors, and a high school worth moving for, each new arrival made the next one easier. Chain migration works on small reassurances: a cousin who can translate at the bank, a neighbour who knows which landlord rents to newcomers, a market where the labels are familiar.
By the 1990s those reassurances were everywhere in Glendale. The city had become not just a place Iranians moved to, but a place they recommended.
Glendale Today
The Persians in Glendale do not have a single signposted quarter the way Tehrangeles does around Westwood. Their presence is diffuse, threaded through a city where Armenians are the larger and more visible group. You read it instead in the grocery aisles, the kebab patios, and the surnames on dentist and accountant signs along Brand.
Many of the most affluent and secular Iranian families still cluster to the west, in Beverly Hills and along the Westside, while the broad professional middle of the diaspora has spread into the Valley suburbs like Encino and Woodland Hills. Glendale holds a particular slice: practical, family-centred, school-focused, and deeply intermarried with the Armenian world.
Each March, Nowruz quietly takes over kitchens across the city. Families set the haft-seen table, and thirteen days later many drive up into the Verdugo and Angeles foothills for Sizdah Bedar, the picnic that closes the new-year season. It is the clearest annual reminder that, however folded into Glendale’s Armenian majority they may be, the city’s Iranians have kept their own calendar running underneath.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Iranians live in Glendale, California?
Glendale has a population of roughly 196,000, of whom a substantial share are of Iranian origin. The Persians in Glendale form part of the largest Iranian diaspora in the United States, concentrated across Greater Los Angeles.
Are Glendale’s Iranians the same as its Armenians?
They overlap significantly. A large portion of the Iranians who settled in Glendale are Iranian-Armenians, a Christian minority from Tehran, Tabriz, and Isfahan who left Iran after 1979, often by way of Europe, and joined Glendale’s growing Armenian community.
When did Iranians start moving to Glendale?
The first wave were students and professionals in the 1960s and 1970s. The larger migration followed the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the pressures on religious minorities, which together drove the Persians in Glendale to put down permanent roots.
Where can you find Persian food in Glendale?
Long-standing restaurants include Raffi’s Place on East Broadway, open since 1993, Shamshiri Persian Grill on West Stocker Street near the Americana, and Shiraz on South Glendale Avenue. Persian grocers along and around Brand Boulevard stock saffron, dried limes, and fresh flatbread.
How does Glendale compare to Tehrangeles and Westwood?
Tehrangeles, around Westwood in Los Angeles, is the symbolic heart of the diaspora with its own dense commercial strip. Glendale’s Iranian presence is more diffuse and more intertwined with the Armenian community, and it sits a short drive east across the hills.
Why do Iranian families favour Glendale’s schools?
Glendale Unified runs some of the strongest public high schools in the country. Clark Magnet has ranked in the national top one per cent and Crescenta Valley High in the top three per cent, which has drawn Iranian and Iranian-Armenian families toward Glendale and the La Crescenta foothills.
If your family’s story passed through Glendale, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Tehran, Tabriz, and Isfahan, by way of Vienna or Stockholm, to a kebab patio on East Broadway and a haft-seen table in the Verdugo foothills, to wherever you are now.