Pomona Hosts Classic Car Show
The Pomona Fairplex hosted its monthly Swap Meet & Classic Car Show today. The event is a major hub for Southern California's car culture, drawing large crowds of enthusiasts to buy, sell, and trade vintage auto parts and vehicles.
The event's roots trace back to August 3, 1975, when founder George W. Cross III, frustrated by the difficulty of finding parts for his own restoration projects, launched the first automotive-specific swap meet with just a $100 advertising budget. That initial gathering in a parking lot at what was then the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds drew 4,200 people, revealing a massive untapped market for a centralized hub for classic car enthusiasts. The Fairplex itself is a significant architectural case study, sprawling over 487 acres. Many of its core structures are Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects from the 1930s, including the 12,000-square-foot Fine Arts building (now the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts), designed by architect Claud Beelman. These buildings represent a major period of American civic architecture and infrastructure investment. From an urban planning perspective, the immense venue operates as a temporary city, with its success tied to the car-centric design of post-war Southern California. The region's development of suburbs and freeways, and the decline of its extensive electric railway system, created the ideal conditions for a culture built around the automobile, making large, accessible venues like the Fairplex essential. Fairplex is now at the center of a significant urban redevelopment proposal called the "Specific Plan." This long-term vision aims to transform over 300 acres of surface parking into a mixed-use community with up to 10,500 housing units, 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, and a 90-acre public park at its core. The master plan explicitly focuses on sustainability, a key principle in Fairplex's 2018 Strategic Plan. The redevelopment aims to create a "world class mixed-use campus" with a framework for green building, better land utilization, and creating connections to surrounding neighborhoods and future transit lines. This includes projects like stormwater capture and creating an extensive mobility network of trails and bike paths.
