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

Arroyo Seco Parkway

Los Angeles (Citywide), South Pasadena

Freeways don’t really belong in this assessment of L.A. street names, but the Arroyo Seco – Spanish for “dry creek bed” – deserves a mention. Long before pavement and automobiles, the “Arroyo Seco Road” was named by 1855 and possibly much earlier. Decades later, it was transformed into America’s first freeway, built at a cost of $6 million and officially dedicated on December 30th, 1940. (Its original speed limit, 45 mph, explains those startling 5 mph off-ramps!) It was designated State Route 110 in 1981. The Arroyo Seco Parkway is a segment of another notable road: Route 66.

Featured Offbeat Street

Kohler Street

DTLA

Charles Kohler (1830-1887) was a wine industry pioneer who barely lived in Los Angeles – if at all. Born in Grabow, Germany, Kohler reportedly immigrated to the U.S. in 1850 and eventually settled in San Francisco. A classical musician, for several years he played concerts up and down the state with fellow Teuton John Frohling. The two then got into viniculture and officially partnered as Kohler & Frohling in 1856, with Frohling operating vineyards here in L.A. and Kohler in the Bay Area. Soon they became the biggest wine merchants in the state and effectively put California wine on the map. Not content with that achievement, in 1857 they cofounded Anaheim with L.A. city surveyor George Hansen, an Austrian. But poor old Frohling didn’t get to enjoy his success for long: he dropped dead in 1862 at the tender age of 35. Kohler kept the company going, and although he remained in San Francisco, he and his sons oversaw the Kohler & Frohling vineyards where Kohler Street sits today. (Incredible as it may seem, this industrial neighborhood was once an ocean of grapes.) The original Kohler Street was where 9th Street now lies, between San Pedro and Alameda. The current roadway was named in 1887, months after Charles Kohler was felled by a stroke on a San Francisco cable car. He entrusted this land and his fortune to his widow Elise (1830-1915), another German. His will noted, poignantly: “Without her, I had been nothing; with her, I was all.”