Downey, California

Downey was named for John Gately Downey, a Los Angeles pharmacist who became California's seventh governor in eighteen sixty, the first to have been born in Ireland. Rancho Santa Gertrudes, a Mexican land grant, once covered this stretch of the Los Angeles River plain. The town incorporated in nineteen fifty-six and grew into a bedroom community for aerospace workers at the nearby North American Aviation plant, where engineers built the Apollo command module and worked on the Space Shuttle.

The oldest surviving McDonald's in the world still operates here on Lakewood Boulevard, opened in nineteen fifty-three and now a protected landmark. Downey also claims the Carpenters, the brother-sister duo whose studio recordings in the nineteen seventies became among the best-selling of the era, as hometown alumni.