Welcome to L.A. Street Names, the origin stories of street names across Los Angeles County, from the shortest cul-de-sacs to the longest boulevards. Mysteries solved, myths debunked, scandals exposed, history revealed. This is an ongoing project with more than 2,000 streets – and growing. See FAQ for more information.

Featured Major Street

Rodeo Drive

Beverly Hills
Rodeo Drive during its bridle path days

Rodeo Drive derives its name from an old Spanish-Mexican land grant: Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas (“roundup of the waters”, for the confluence of two canyon streams). The 4,539 acre rancho was deeded c. 1838 to María Rita Valdez de Villa (c. 1791-1854), whose father was reportedly gifted the land in the late 1700s by the King of Spain. (Her mother was the mixed-race daughter of one of the 44 pobladores who founded Los Angeles in 1781.) Doña Rita raised livestock and built two adobes near present-day Sunset Boulevard and Alpine Drive, but the hardships of managing this vast property were too great and so in 1854 she sold the struggling rancho to Benjamin Davis Wilson and Henry Hancock. Then she died. The land went through several more owners (their names survive in Hamel Drive, Preuss Road, and Whitworth Drive) before finally becoming Beverly Hills in 1906, courtesy of Burton Green’s Rodeo Land & Water Co., which took the rancho’s name and gave it to this street. Note the median on Rodeo north of Santa Monica Boulevard: in 1907, trolley tracks were laid out here. The so-called “Coldwater Canyon Line” ran streetcars up to Sunset until 1923, when the Pacific Electric Railway got tired of losing money on it and shut it down. The median then served as a bridle path for residents and their horses until around 1954. Now it’s a bunch of bushes.

Featured Offbeat Street

Marilla Avenue

Avalon
1924 passport photo for Edwin J. and Etta Marilla Whitney

Etta Marilla Whitney (1862-1950) named the city of Avalon. Born Etta Marilla Ticknor in Flint, MI, in 1885 she married the New York-born, Michigan-raised Edwin John “E.J.” Whitney (1852-1931); E.J.’s sister happened to be Clara Shatto, who with her husband George bought Santa Catalina Island in 1887. The townsite they planned there was going to be called “Shatto” until Etta, a fan of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, in which King Arthur retires to the mythical island of Avalon, suggested that instead. The Whitneys actually lived in Avalon for years, from its rugged early days through the 1910s; they ran the Glenmore Hotel and E.J. served as Catalina’s first justice of the peace. They eventually relocated to Claremont, where their son Walter attended Pomona College. He would later become a professor of astronomy there.