Andrew Aloysius Boyle (1818-1871) spent 13 quiet years in Los Angeles after 40 dramatic ones elsewhere. Born in Ireland, Boyle and his siblings came to the U.S. in 1832 in search of their father (mother had died) and settled in an Irish colony in Mexican-owned Texas. As a young soldier, Boyle survived the 1836 Goliad massacre during the Texas Revolution; he then spent the 1840s running Gulf of Mexico commerce out of New Orleans. There he married Elizabeth Christie and had two children. Their son died in infancy and Elizabeth herself perished in 1849 while Andrew was in Mexico, having narrowly escaped a sinking ship. (It’s said that the false report of her husband’s death gave Elizabeth the “brain fever” that killed her.) Boyle relocated to San Francisco in 1851 to run a shoe store, then came to L.A. in 1858 with his daughter Maria Elizabeth (1847-1933) and purchased the late Esteban López’s Paredon Blanco (“White Bluff”) vineyard east of the river. While selling shoes and his Paredon Blanco wine, Boyle – a Southern Democrat who was opposed to giving nonwhites the vote – eventually joined City Council. As for Maria Boyle, in 1867 she married William H. Workman; four years after her father’s death, the Workmans, along with Isaias Hellman and John Lazzarevich, subdivided the Paredon Blanco vineyard as Boyle Heights. Boyle Avenue was named in 1878.
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