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Second Street runs through the middle of Belmont Shore, a beach neighborhood in Long Beach that reaches from around to and . Fifteen side streets cross it, and together they make up a shopping and restaurant strip about fourteen blocks long.
The land was still underwater at high tide when Henry Huntington bought it in 1903 as part of a tract first platted as West Naples. Developers McGrath and Selover began building it up in 1920, filling and grading the ground before Long Beach annexed it in 1926. They named it Belmont, Italian for beautiful mountain, for its position below the bluff.
Most of the side streets are named for inland Southern California towns such as Corona, Covina and Claremont, picked to draw summer buyers from hotter parts of the region. The 1921 oil strike on nearby Signal Hill brought more of them, and Belmont Shore filled in with small Spanish style houses set close together on narrow lots.
Second Street's storefronts went up through the 1920s, briefly in an Egyptian revival style, including a drug store that opened at 5128 East Second Street in 1927 next to an Egyptian themed market. The Belmont Theater opened on the street in 1929 and ran as a movie house until 1978. Long Beach's opened its own building on Second Street at Claremont Avenue that same July. It is still standing.
The beach sits inside the Long Beach breakwater, which keeps the water calmer than at Huntington Beach or Seal Beach and draws kitesurfers more than swimmers. Toward the Naples end, Bay Shore Avenue meets the bay at a spot known locally as .
