L.A. Street Names – Los Angeles Street Names – their origins, their histories, their meanings

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 2,100 streets – and growing. See FAQ for more information.

Featured Major Street

York Boulevard

Eagle Rock, Highland Park

October 30th, 1909 article from the Highland Park Herald

This was previously called New York Street back in 1900. It was born thirteen years earlier as Eureka Avenue on developer Ralph Rogers’s “New York tract”. (The tract, ironically, had a different New York Street where Irvington Place now lies.) Its name being altered to York Boulevard came about in 1909. Property owners demanded the change, claiming that the street was one hundred feet wide and thus qualified as a proper boulevard. They also argued that too many envelopes addressed to “New York St.” were getting mailed to New York state. Sure. This was probably just a front for a more aesthetic desire for the change: the neighborhood had earned the nickname “Poverty Flats”, and its main drag being dirty old New York Street didn’t help. York Boulevard simply had a more elegant ring to it.

Featured Offbeat Street

Everett Street

Elysian Park

Developer Everett E. Hall (1854-1936) named this street for himself in 1886. Born in Ionia, MI – he also laid out an Ionia Street nearby, now lost under the 101 freeway – Hall moved to Rapid City, SD in 1880 and ran a bank with his father and brother. He came to Pomona three years later to set up another short-lived bank but soon shifted west to Los Angeles and joined the team that built Rosedale Cemetery (now Angelus Rosedale). In early 1886, Hall partnered with William Wallace Stilson and a Minneapolis-based investor named William McCrory to buy 200 acres from Victor Beaudry and set up a tract they dubbed “Angeleño Heights”. Hall was also behind the stillborn “Sunset” townsite (present-day Westwood) in 1887 and helped establish both “Soldiers’ Home” (now the VA – see Veteran Avenue) and the town of Burbank in 1888. He and Helen McAllaster were wed in 1886; they had one son, Herbert Allison, whose middle name was a nod to Hall’s brother (see Allison Avenue), but the little lad died at five months – not long after the death of his uncle. Helen divorced Hall in 1895 and Hall married Alice G. Severns three years later. It was a happy if childless union that ended with Alice’s death in 1919.