This street was born plain old Palm Avenue. The year was 1901, and H.J. Whitley was developing his Hollywood Ocean View tract, on which he named several streets after trees. When Los Angeles annexed Hollywood in 1910, all the Hollywood streets that shared the names of L.A. streets had to be renamed to avoid confusion. Only Sycamore Avenue and Orange Drive have retained Whitley’s arboreal names, whereas Cedar Street (eventually) became Camrose, Magnolia Avenue became Cherokee, Olive Avenue became Orchid, and Palm Avenue became Las Palmas. And it wasn’t just because las palmas is Spanish for “the palms”: one of Hollywood’s showcase homes, the 5 acre estate of Robert J. Northam (later Jacob Stern) at Hollywood and Vine, was known as “Casa de las Palmas”. Whoever renamed this street would have known about it. Showbiz trivia: the old barn on that estate served as the “studio” for Cecil B. De Mille‘s The Squaw Man, the first feature film shot in Hollywood.
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