What to See in Claremont - Top Sights and Attractions

Museum in Claremont, California. The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is a paleontology museum in Claremont, California, that is part of The Webb Schools. It is the only nationally accredited museum on a secondary school campus in the United States. The museum has two circular 4,000 sq. ft. exhibition halls and 20,000 unique annual visitors. The collections number about 140,000 specimens, 95% of which were found by Webb students on fossil-collecting trips called “Peccary Trips,” expeditions usually centered in California, Utah, and Montana. The collections consist primarily of vertebrate, invertebrate, and track fossils and the museum's large track collection is widely recognized as one of the most diverse in the world.

The museum has three full-time staff, two of whom are research paleontologists who conduct research with Webb students in a specialized curriculum through The Webb Schools' Science Department.^[3]

Laemmle Theatres is a group of family-run arthouse movie theaters in the Los Angeles area. It was established in 1938 and is owned and operated by Robert Laemmle and his son Greg Laemmle.

Robert Laemmle's father Max and uncle Kurt, cousins of Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle, bought their first movie theater in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1938.

There are eight locations: Claremont 5 in Claremont, Glendale 5 in Glendale, Monica 4-plex in Santa Monica, Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles, Town Center 5 in Encino, NoHo 7 in North Hollywood, and Laemmle Theatres 7 in Santa Clarita. The Laemmle Grande 4-Plex on South Figueroa Street closed October 25, 2009 as L.A. Live's Regal Cinema complex was set to open. Construction of the Santa Clarita theater was completed in 2020, but its opening was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It opened on April 9, 2021.

In December 2011, the Glendale City Council and Redevelopment Agency approved a $12.8 million plan to develop a loft with 42 residential units, a 5-screen Laemmle Theaters, and a Panda Inn restaurant. Construction of the residential building complex began in mid-2015, and it opened in August of 2018. With the Glendale location's reopening on May 21, 2021, Laemmle Theatres will be operating all of the locations that had been open in 2019 prior to the closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.^[4]

Botanical garden in Claremont, California. The California Botanic Garden is a botanical garden in Claremont, California, in the United States, just south of the San Gabriel foothills. The garden, at 86 acres, is the largest botanic garden in the state dedicated to California native plants. It contains some 70,000 native Californian plants, representing 2,000 native species, hybrids and cultivars. The seed bank has embryos for the thousands of rare plants.

The garden has an active research department, specializing in systematic botany and floristics. The herbarium of Pomona College, housed at the garden, was transferred from the college in 1996. It holds over 1,200,000 specimens. The journal Aliso is published by the organization semiannually. The garden offers graduate degrees in botany through Claremont Graduate University.

The garden originated in 1927 when Susanna Bixby Bryant established a native garden on her rancho in Orange County. The garden relocated to Claremont in 1951. The facility, run by a non-profit organization, was open to the public with free admission for 58 years; in 2009 an admission fee was implemented. In 2019, the garden was renamed "California Botanic Garden" to better represent the contents of its collections.^[5]

The Claremont Colleges are a consortium of seven high end private institutions of higher education located in Claremont, California, United States. They comprise five undergraduate colleges —Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, and Pitzer College—and two graduate schools—Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute. All the members except KGI have adjoining campuses, together covering roughly 1 sq mi.

The consortium was founded in 1925 by Pomona College president James A. Blaisdell, who proposed a collegiate university design inspired by Oxford University. He sought to provide the specialization, flexibility, and personal attention commonly found in small colleges, but with the resources of a large university. The consortium has since grown to roughly 8,500 students and 3,270 faculty and staff, and offers more than 2,000 courses every semester. The colleges share a central library, campus safety services, health services, and other resources, managed by The Claremont Colleges Services (TCCS). Among the undergraduate schools, there is significant social interaction and academic cross-registration, but each college maintains a distinct identity.

Admission to the Claremont Colleges is considered highly selective. For the Class of 2020 admissions cycle, four of the five most selective liberal art colleges in the U.S. by acceptance rate were among the 5Cs, and the remaining college, Scripps, had the second-lowest acceptance rate among women's colleges. The Fiske Guide to Colleges describes the consortium as "a collection of intellectual resources unmatched in America."^[6]

The Spirit of Spanish Music is a sculpture by Burt William Johnson. It was commissioned by the Pomona College class of 1915 and placed in the Lebus Court of the Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music at Pomona College, one of a group of buildings conceived for the expansion of Pomona College and built in the mid-1910s by architect Myron Hunt using details of the "ornamental Spanish style".

This style, and the fact that the building where it stands was intended for the study and performance of music, give the sculpture its name. (Other names for the sculpture sometimes are seen in various sources, including Pastoral Flutist and Youth).

The figure itself, a boy in "classic contrapposto stance" playing an elongated flute, was influenced by the 15th century Florentine sculptor Desiderio da Settignano It reflects the overall "Arcadian" theme Hunt intended for Pomona's south campus.

The sculpture's harmony with the building surrounding its courtyard setting was described in 1921 as "happily eloquent of the spirit of the place". "The pose is exquisite," reports another journal of the period, "and the design peculiarly appropriate to the Spanish architecture of the beautiful temple of music it is to adorn." In a lecture on the occasion of the Centennial in 2015 of the statue and the building, art historian George L. Gorse labels the setting "A Pastoral Theatre", and characterizes the sculpture as "Vergilian 'Arcadia'.. absolutely Vergilian."

The sculpture was cast in bronze by the Gorham Company in Providence, R.I. It is life-size, approximately 137 cm (54 in.) in height. Before being delivered to Claremont and installed in Lebus Court, it was exhibited by the Gorham Company at their gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York, and at the Winter Exhibition at the National Academy.

After part of the fountain collapsed, the statue was removed in early 2015 while repairs were made. Before its return on 14 August 2015, The Spirit of Spanish Music was restored by conservator Donna Williams, including the repair of the boy's broken flute.^[8]