Santa Fe Springs, California

Before it was a city of warehouses and distribution centers, Santa Fe Springs was a spa town. In the eighteen seventies a sulfur spring spa opened here, and in eighteen eighty-six the Santa Fe Railway bought the springs, banking on the area's warm mineral springs to attract health-seekers from Los Angeles. The Santa Fe Railway named a station here, cementing both the tourism trade and the town's name.

Then in nineteen twenty-one one of the most dramatic oil strikes in California history erupted beneath the resort grounds. Within two years the springs were surrounded by more than one thousand oil derricks. The resort closed; the gushers paid off.

Santa Fe Springs incorporated as a city in nineteen fifty-seven and later turned toward industry. Today it sits at the center of one of the densest freight logistics networks in North America, with the same rail lines that once carried tourists now moving containers.