Garden Grove is a city in northern Orange County, California, United States, located 34 miles (55 km) southeast of the city of Los Angeles in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The population is at about 176,000. State Route 22, also known as the Garden Grove Freeway, passes through the city in an east-west direction. The western portion of the city is known as West Garden Grove. Garden Grove was founded by Alonzo Cook in 1874. A school district and Methodist church were organized that year. It remained a small rural crossroads until the arrival of the railroad in 1905. The rail connection helped the town prosper with crops of orange, walnuts, chili peppers and later strawberries. In 1933, much of the town’s central business district was destroyed by the Long Beach earthquake, and one person was killed at the high school. The post-World War II boom led to rapid development, and Garden Grove was incorporated as a city in 1956 with about 44,000 residents.
Christ Cathedral, formerly the Crystal Cathedral, is an American church building of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. The reflective glass building, by the firm of Philip Johnson/John Burgee Architects seats 2,248 people. The church was touted as “the largest glass building in the world” when it was completed in 1981. The building has one of the largest musical instruments in the world, the Hazel Wright Memorial Organ. Until 2013, the building was the principal place of worship for Crystal Cathedral Ministries (now Shepherd’s Grove), a congregation of the Reformed Church in America, founded in 1955 by Robert H. Schuller. Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy in October 2010 and in February 2012 sold the building and its adjacent campus to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange for use as the diocese’s new cathedral. The building, especially the interior, was renovated to accommodate the Roman Catholicliturgy. It was the stated intentions of the diocese to respect the style of the original architecture to the greatest extent possible.
An annual event held over Memorial Day weekend, the Garden Grove Strawberry Festival is one of the largest community festivals in the western United States, attracting an estimated 250,000 visitors. It began in 1958 and celebrates the city’s agricultural past, which includes cultivating crops such as chili peppers, oranges, walnuts and strawberries. Part of the festivities include the cutting of the world’s largest strawberry shortcake, carnival rides and vendors and a celebrity-filled parade. Numerous Garden Grove organizations, including the Miss Garden Grove Scholarship Program, are part of the Memorial Day weekend festivities every year. In commemoration of Garden Grove’s 50th anniversary, the city painted some of its fire hydrants with a design that featured a strawberry, recognizing the festival as a big part of Garden Grove’s history.
Garden Grove is home to two stage theaters, the Gem Theater and the Festival Amphitheater. The Festival Amphitheater hosts Shakespeare Orange County, which presents an annual Shakespeare Festival each summer. Both venues are owned by the City of Garden Grove, but operated by outside entities. The Gem Theater is currently operated by Damien Lorton and Nicole Cassesso of ‘One More Productions’. The Festival Amphitheater is managed by Thomas Bradac, the producing artistic director of Shakespeare Orange County. The Garden Grove Playhouse used to be an active theatre, now closed down. It was operated by a non-profit group of the same name. The song “Garden Grove” by Sublime details taking a trip to Garden Grove.
