The neighborhood
What Westminster asks of a crew
Westminster is flat. No canyon roads, no hillside switchbacks, no high-rise loading dock to book, and outside the mobile home parks almost nothing above two floors. The grid is generous too: tract streets with wide curb lanes, deep driveways and attached garages, so a 26-foot truck usually parks at the address instead of three houses down. The 405 crosses the south of the city, the 22 sits just above it, and Beach Boulevard is the north-to-south spine everybody defaults to.
The pressure point is Bolsa Avenue. Little Saigon runs along it, and the block around the Asian Garden Mall at 9200 Bolsa moves slowly on weekends, slowly again on weekday evenings, and differently altogether in the run-up to Tet, when part of the street closes for the parade. We stage Bolsa jobs early rather than argue with them. The old Westminster Mall site off the 405 is being cleared for the Bolsa Pacific redevelopment, so the streets around it change month to month. And the Midway City pocket, unincorporated county land sitting inside the city, means a Westminster mailing address is not always a Westminster jurisdiction. We check the address, not the postmark.
30th StreetUniversity AveRay StreetMorley FieldBalboa Park