El Cerrito (Spanish for “The Little Hill”) is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, and forms part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Take a look below for 20 fascinating and interesting facts about El Cerrito, California, United States.
1. It has a population of 25,962 according to the 2020 census.
2. El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
3. It was incorporated in 1917 as a village with 1,500 residents.
4. As of the census in 2000, there were 23,171 people, 10,208 households and 5,971 families in the city.
5. El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
6. They settled in what was then Don Víctor Castro’s Rancho San Pablo, and adjacent to the ranch owned by the family of Luís María Peralta, the Rancho San Antonio.
7. A post office opened at the settlement in 1909 and the refugee camp became known as Rust, after Wilhelm F. Rust, its first postmaster.
8. The village’s residents did not care for the name and changed it to El Cerrito (meaning “little hill” or “knoll”) in 1916, in reference to the many individual hills in the village.
9. A year later, El Cerrito was incorporated as a village with 1,500 residents.
10. El Cerrito was incorporated in August 1917.
11. The communities of Stege Junction, Rust, Schmidtville, and Schindler, were all included in the new city.
12. The 1920 census shows that the Schmidtville community had many Italian immigrants.
13. A post office operated at Schmidtville from 1900 to 1901.
14. San Pablo Avenue stretches the length of El Cerrito and is the primary commercial and retail corridor of the city, though there is a segment in which the businesses on the west side of the avenue are actually in Richmond Annex but have an El Cerrito postal address.
15. El Cerrito is home to El Cerrito Plaza, a large automobile-oriented (though it is also served by public transit at the adjacent BART station) shopping center originally built as a regional mall in the 1950s, and the Cerrito Theater, a restored two-screen movie theater known for offering beer, wine, and a full dining menu. The shopping center is surrounded by other commercial and retail businesses along San Pablo Avenue and Fairmount Avenue.
16. El Cerrito has been mentioned in the book ttfn by Lauren Myracle. Character Angela finds out the family is moving to El Cerrito.
17. El Cerrito is mentioned in the song “Golden Gate Fields” by Rancid.
18. Metallica wrote Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets in a small house in El Cerrito where the band lived for a while. Cliff Burton joined the band only if Metallica would agree to move to El Cerrito.
19. Game Theory’s 1988 song “You Drive” mentions El Cerrito in the first line.
20. Cracker recorded a song titled “El Cerrito” released on their 2014 album Berkeley to Bakersfield.