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. Storefronts sit under one or two floors between Grand Avenue and Mariposa Avenue, with parking parallel on both sides. The angled parking downtown is one block over, on Richmond Street, Mariposa Avenue and Holly Avenue.
, the police department and the fire station sit together on Main Street between Holly Avenue and Grand Avenue. Main Street runs north past 's brick 1927 campus to Imperial Highway, the edge 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.
Richmond Street has the oldest buildings still standing. , a plaster theater front from 1921, still runs as a nonprofit there. Its Wurlitzer organ is visible through the doors. A few blocks away, the Urho Saari Swim Stadium is an Art Deco natatorium with a male and a female swimmer carved in relief on either side of its own doors.
sits south of downtown, its towers visible past the rooftops from parts of Main Street. It caught fire in October 2025, an explosion in the jet fuel unit visible for miles that did not affect flights at LAX.
Shot in Downtown El Segundo
El Segundo High School'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
El Segundo High School
Played the fictional Arcadia High and Beverly High, and an unnamed school in Superbad and Family Switch
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
Old Town Music Hall
Played Old Town Music Hall, as itself
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 Old Town Music Hall, 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
Beverly Hills High School in Beverly Hills, California
The CW's All American used El Segundo High School'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 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. Try searching brick campus refinery skyline now.
The Point Richmond Historic District in Richmond, California
Richmond's own commercial district, on Washington Avenue in Point Richmond next to Standard Oil's first California refinery, 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. 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. Try searching storefronts under awnings now.
119th Street in Whiting, Indiana
Standard Oil built a refinery in Whiting on Lake Michigan starting in 1889, and Standard Oil of Indiana was headquartered in the town that grew up around it. Whiting's own downtown business district runs along 119th Street, where a commercial building at 1309 119th Street dates to about 1925, close to the years Main Street's own buildings and El Segundo High School went up. The plainer storefront blocks along that street are the better match for El Segundo's own plainer buildings, not the district's more ornamented landmark buildings. Keep the frame on the plainer storefront blocks rather than the district's ornamented theater entrances and marquees, and control modern signage and cars the way any Main Street shot would need to. Try searching plainer storefront blocks now.
