The city is part of what is known as the South Bay region of the metropolitan area. A small section of the city, 1. Torrance has a moderate year-round climate with average rainfall of 12 inches mm per year. For thousands of years, the area of Torrance was occupied by the Tongva Native Americans.
The land that is now part of the City of Torrance and much of the modern South Bay was part of the extensive marshlands. In the early s, real estate developer Jared Sidney Torrance and other investors saw the value of creating a mixed industrialβresidential community south of Los Angeles. They purchased part of an old Spanish land grant and hired landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. The city of Torrance was formally incorporated in May , the townsite initially being bounded by Western Avenue on the east, Del Amo Boulevard on the north, Crenshaw Boulevard on the west, and on the south by Plaza del Amo east of where it meets Carson Street, and by Carson Street west of where it meets Plaza del Amo.
The first residential avenue created in Torrance was Gramercy and the second avenue was Andreo. Many of the houses on these avenues reached the centennial mark in Both avenues are located in the area referred to as Old Torrance.
This section of Torrance is under review to be classified as a historical district. Torrance was planned as a new prototype of a balanced industrial city based on the principles of the Garden City Movement. The original tract developed by the Olmstead Brothers consists of city blocks divided into three sub-districts: residential, commercial, and industrial.
The plan is most notable for its axial landscaped downtown commercial neighborhood aligned to have a view of Mount San Antonio in the San Gabriel Mountains. The Olmsted Tract includes a number of buildings designed by the noted Southern California Architect Irving Gill, including the original train depot. The footprint of the downtown neighborhood, now called Old Torrance, was designed on a diagonal to allow the trade breezes coming from the Pacific Ocean to keep the air clean from industrial pollution for the residential and commercial neighborhoods.
