Long before Westminster Mall filled the block with department stores, the property held rows of ponds. The City of Westminster’s history says the world’s largest goldfish farm moved into the area during the 1920s. Local historian Mary Adams Urashima identifies it as Henry Kiyomi Akiyama’s Pacific Goldfish Farm, a roughly 40-acre operation near Golden West Street and Bolsa Avenue.
Akiyama had arrived in Southern California from Japan as a teenager in 1904 and began raising fish full-time in the 1920s. An aerial photograph from 1955 appears to show about 100 ponds, plus buildings used for an indoor hatchery. The farm raised goldfish and koi for the pet trade, part of a wider Japanese American aquaculture network in the Wintersburg area. Urashima reports that freeway construction prompted Westminster to acquire the land for commercial development. Westminster Mall later opened in 1974. The contrast is hard to picture now: a freeway-facing retail site once depended on shallow ponds, careful breeding, and pickup-truck deliveries of what one family called “swimming rainbows.”
