A short Main Street a few blocks from LAX and the Chevron refinery, with a 1927 brick high school that keeps turning up on screen.
What Downtown El Segundo looks like
El Segundo's Main Street runs only a few blocks, a small commercial strip inside a city that is mostly industrial. The name is Spanish for the second. Standard Oil bought 840 acres here in 1911 to build its second West Coast refinery, and the city incorporated in 1917. Roughly three quarters of El Segundo today is zoned industrial or commercial. The refinery alone, now Chevron's, still covers more than a quarter of the city.
Main Street's commercial core runs from Grand Avenue to Mariposa Avenue, built to a historic pattern under the city's downtown plan. Storefronts sit under one or two floors, and the parking on Main Street itself is parallel on both sides. The angled parking downtown is on Richmond Street, Mariposa Avenue and Holly Avenue, not on Main Street. , the police department and the fire station sit together on Main Street between Holly Avenue and Grand Avenue.
Richmond Street has the oldest buildings still standing. opened there in 1921 as a theater for Standard Oil's own refinery workers. It still runs as a nonprofit, with a 2,600-pipe Wurlitzer organ installed in 1968.
Main Street runs north past to Imperial Highway, which marks the boundary of . LAX's own materials say routine air traffic does not fly over El Segundo, so the airport is more a fact of the map here than something overhead. sits to the south. It caught fire in October 2025. The explosion, in the refinery's jet fuel unit, was visible for miles and did not affect flights at LAX.
Films shot in Downtown El Segundo
's brick 1927 campus sits at the north end of Main Street. The school has played other high schools on screen several times since 2006.
Superbad, 2007
Superbad shot its high school exteriors here in the fall of 2006. The same campus has stood in for other schools since. The CBS series Joan of Arcadia used it as the fictional Arcadia High. The CW's All American used it as Beverly High, with football practice on the field and a school board meeting scene inside. The Hot Chick and the Netflix film Family Switch also shot scenes on the same campus.
Candy Cane Lane, 2023
Candy Cane Lane is a 2023 Amazon film starring Eddie Murphy. It opens with a couple of establishing shots in El Segundo. One is the high school. Another shows , seen here from Richmond Street. The neighborhood street the title actually refers to, lit up for Christmas, is a set built on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot. It is not a real El Segundo block.
What Downtown El Segundo can double for
Documented · present day, from All American's first season in 2018 onward
Beverly Hills, California, Beverly Hills High School, the real school the show's fictional Beverly High represents
The CW's All American used 's brick 1927 campus for Beverly High. That is the name the show gives Beverly Hills High School, the real school its lead character transfers to from South Los Angeles. Production filmed football practice on the field and a school board meeting inside the building. The show never shot on the actual Beverly Hills High School campus. It needed a high school old enough and well kept enough to work as the wealthier of the two schools in the story, and El Segundo's brick building and bell tower did that from the outside.
The refinery towers are visible from parts of the same campus and would need to stay out of frame. Beverly Hills has no comparable industrial skyline nearby.
Architectural comparison · the 1900s through the 1920s, when the commercial district went up next to the refinery
Richmond, California, Washington Avenue in the Point Richmond Historic District, away from the Queen Anne cottages on the residential streets around it
El Segundo is named for being Standard Oil's second refinery town in California. The company's first refinery was in Richmond, on San Francisco Bay. El Segundo's own plant went up in 1911, once the Richmond refinery neared its limit and Standard Oil needed capacity further south. The commercial district next to that first refinery, on Washington Avenue in Point Richmond, is listed on the National Register as typically two story buildings with flat roofs and storefronts under retractable awnings over the sidewalk. That is close to what Main Street in El Segundo already has, storefronts of one or two floors under awnings of their own. A production that needs the earlier of Standard Oil's two refinery towns, without traveling to the real one, could use Main Street for Point Richmond instead.
Point Richmond's storefronts also carry upper bay windows and parapets that Main Street's plainer buildings do not have, so a shot would need to stay on the ground floor rather than climb the facade. The Queen Anne cottages just off Washington Avenue would need to stay out of frame too.
Architectural comparison · the 1920s, when Whiting's own commercial storefronts went up
Whiting, Indiana, the plainer commercial vernacular blocks on 119th Street, away from the district's landmark buildings
Standard Oil built a refinery in Whiting on Lake Michigan starting in 1889. Standard Oil of Indiana, the company that ran it, was founded and headquartered in the town that grew up around the plant. Whiting's own downtown business district runs along 119th Street. A commercial building at 1309 119th Street dates to about 1925, close to the years Main Street's own buildings and went up. Nearby, the Hoosier Theater Building is a flat roofed brick storefront building from 1924 with an ornamented theater entrance and marquee that Main Street's plainer buildings do not have. The plainer storefront blocks are the better match, not that showpiece.
Keep the frame on the plainer storefront blocks rather than the Hoosier Theater's marquee and ornamented entrance, and control modern signage and cars the way any Main Street shot would need to.
