In October 1888, due to L.A.’s rapid expansion during the previous year’s real estate boom, the city had loads of duplicate street names. That was a problem in that pre-ZIP Code era, so City Council formed a special committee to cull them down. Thus this byway, then called Virginia Street, was given a unique new moniker: Toluca Street. It was likely picked by civil engineers out of an “idea file” they kept of potential street names culled from newspapers, books, etc. Toluca, a large city in Mexico, was mentioned in the Los Angeles press a few times in the 1880s – Times correspondent Fannie Brigham Ward wrote a long article about it in 1886 – so that’s probably how our engineers came by the name. (Toluca’s own etymology is murky: some say it references an Aztec god named Tolo; some say it means “where the head is bowed down” in Nahuatl.) As for Toluca Lake, eight miles northwest of here, it was named sometime between 1888 – same as this street! – and 1892.
Find it on the map:
