Most of this city went up in one decade.

The dairy farms were subdivided after the war and the city filled in fast — more houses went up here in the fifties than in any decade before or since. A street built that way has the same bathroom in every house: a porcelain-over-steel tub set into a tiled alcove, often in whichever color was fashionable the year it was built. When that enamel chips, the steel underneath starts rusting outward from the chip, which is why the stain keeps growing no matter how hard it gets scrubbed.

The rest of Bellflower is apartments. It is one of the most densely built cities in the country, and the buildings that filled the gaps between the tract houses came later, which usually means a molded one-piece tub and shower instead of tub and tile. Those don't chip. They go dull and chalky, and they crack in fine lines around the drain where the floor flexes underneath. Same service, different preparation — worth saying which one you have when you call.

And a lot of tubs here belong to somebody who isn't the one bathing in them. That changes what the job is for: the question stops being how it looks and becomes how fast the unit is back in service. That's a different conversation, and it has its own page.