San Marino is an affluent city in the western San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, California, immediately south of Pasadena and roughly ten miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Its name reaches back to the Republic of San Marino in Europe: in the 1870s, landowner James DeBarth Shorb named his rancho after his grandfather's Maryland plantation, which in turn honored the small European republic. Railroad and utility magnate Henry E. Huntington purchased the Shorb estate in 1903, and the city incorporated in 1913 from the former Wilson, Patton, and Huntington ranchos. The city is defined by its almost exclusively residential character. It has no multi-family or industrial zoning, and its built environment is dominated by detached single-family homes constructed mostly between the 1920s and 1960s on large, landscaped lots. That deliberate low-density planning, combined with mature trees and estate-style architecture, gives San Marino a calm, garden-suburb quality rare in the Los Angeles basin. San Marino is best known beyond its borders for The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, a 120-acre research and cultural institution with world-renowned gardens, galleries, and rare-book collections. Public education is provided by the small, highly regarded San Marino Unified School District, which maintains partnerships with The Huntington and nearby Caltech. The city of about 12,500 residents suits families and professionals drawn by the schools, the low-density streetscape, and proximity to Pasadena's dining and employment centers. It offers a distinctly suburban, privacy-oriented way of life a short drive from the amenities of the San Gabriel Valley and greater Los Angeles.