Hacienda Heights is an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County which gained its current name in 1962 due to the community being centered around Hacienda Boulevard, prior to this the area was known as North Whittier Heights (after its southern neighbor) with the area south of Clark Ave., known as Hillgrove (the now defunct elementary School, Hillgrove Elementary is named after this community).
After purchasing the 1,826 acre tract of land, Hart and Torrance planted Citrus (primarily oranges) and avocado groves, and a small community sprung up around its packing mills. Eventually the area transformed from a small agricultural town to a large bedroom community during the 1940s, gaining speed in the 1950s and finally hitting its maximum growth in the early 1970s. Most residents work elsewhere in the greater Los Angeles County area, and although there have been multiple attempts to incorporate or merge with La Puente or Whittier, these attempts have all failed up to this point.
Hacienda Heights has a new community Center, built in the old location of Hillgrove Elementary School (which is was of the oldest elementary schools in Hacienda Heights).
The Community Center opened October 25, 2014.
With a large multipurpose room and performance center. This venue can be used for performances, wedding receptions, anniversary parties, community group meetings and seminars.
This community center includes "Circles of a Ripple" by artist James Dinh, creating a gathering place for visitors of the community center and park.
•	The highest point in Hacienda Heights is found in the Puente Hills (which are relatively geologically new), which is Workman Hill, elevation 1,388 feet (423 meters), just southeast of Turnbull Canyon Road and Skyline Drive.
•	Hacienda Heights (as measured from the center) is 11 statute miles (by air) from Disneyland (Anaheim). This makes Anaheim the closest large city (over 250,000) to Hacienda Heights.
•	Hacienda Heights is situated next to the relatively newly discovered Puente Hills Fault Line (which is the fault on which the 5.9, 1987 Whittier Narrows Earthquake took place on). This fault runs from Northern Orange County to just under downtown Los Angeles.
•	The Puente Hills are still new (geologically speaking) with the roots of these hills existing somewhere far off the west coast of the ancestral continent of North America. The uplift of the Puente Hills is the result of the Pacific Plate and its parallel movement to the northwest along the North American Plate, Evidence of all three of these subduction events—volcanoes, granite batholiths, and the crustal shavings—are found buried deep beneath the Puente Hills.
•	The Los Angeles basin in which the Puente Hills/Hacienda Heights reside began forming in the late Miocene epoch according to Wright, 1991; Ingersoll and Rumelhart, 1999 (see references at the bottom of this page).
Basin subsidence at that time was accommodated by large extensional faults including the Puente Hills/Whittier–Elsinore fault system and the Santa Monica fault system.
In the mid-Pliocene the relative plate motion between the North American plate and the Pacific plate changed to produce overall north–south compression of the basin. This compression led to the development of a series of blind thrust faults in the young sediments of the Los Angeles basin, including the Puente Hills thrust system.
The Coyote Hills, Santa Fe Springs, and Los Angeles faults are the three blind fault segments, with no surface trace, that comprise the Puente Hills thrust system. (See picture above left, please click to enlarge) The potential seismic hazard of these faults to the metropolitan Los Angeles was demonstrated in 1987 when the Santa Fe Springs ruptured in the Magnitude 6.0 Whittier Narrows earthquake. Geologic evidence suggests the Puente Hills thrust system as a whole is capable of generating earthquakes greater than Magnitude 7.0, and has caused four such events over the past 11,000 years.
Please do not let this geological information frighten anyone who is thinking of moving to Hacienda Heights, as all areas have their “potential” issues (such as Tornados in many Midwest locations). My father (who was born in 1932) has lived in the area his whole life and has never suffered a loss from earthquakes.
I will also add that Hacienda Heights is a beautiful and family friendly community that has more of smaller community feel than a suburb in Los Angeles County and I can state I found it a beautiful community to spend my childhood years.
* Wright, T.L., 1991. Structural geology and evolution of the Los Angeles basin, California. In: Biddle, K.T. (Ed.), Active Margin Basins. American Association of Petroleum Geologists Memoir, Tulsa, OK, pp. 35–134.
* Ingersoll, R.V., Rumelhart, P.E., 1999. Three-stage evolution of the Los Angeles Basin, Southern California. Geology 27, 593–596.
*Shaw, J.H., Shearer, P.M., 1999. An elusive blind thrust beneath metropolitan Los Angeles. Science 283, 1516–1518.
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