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is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, and is a suburb of Los Angeles. It was incorporated on September 3, 1957. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 72,878.
, a variety of apple tree. Originally settled by dairy farmers of Dutch, Japanese, and Portuguese descent, Bellflower and neighboring Paramount served as the milk production centers for Southern California until soaring post-World War II property values motivated most of the farmers to move several miles east to the Dairy Valley/Dairyland/Dairy City area (now the cities of Cerritos, La Palma, and Cypress). In the 1950s and 1960s, Bellflower Boulevard, the city's main thoroughfare, was a thriving commercial strip. However, suburban growth in Orange County and the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys made Bellflower's relatively humble housing tracts decidedly unattractive, and by the 1990s much of its original population — and the businesses that served it--had left and the city began to show signs of urban problems. The departed were replaced by just about every ethnicity imaginable, to the extent that the "A-B-C" region, formed by Bellflower and neighboring Artesia and Cerritos, is considered one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse in the United States. Bellflower Boulevard has recovered some of its previous business traffic in the last decade.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 15.9 km² (6.2 mi²). 15.7 km² (6.1 mi²) of it is land and 0.2 km² (0.1 mi²) of it (1.14%) is water.
Bellflower is bordered by Downey on the north and northwest, Norwalk and Cerritos on the east, Lakewood on the south, Long Beach on the southwest, and Paramount on the west.