They sound like puns, but Carr Drive and Carr Park come from skincare entrepreneur Fanny Briggs Carr (1860-1937), who owned this land. Fanny A. Briggs was born in New Orleans and grew up in Henderson, KY. She was in Santa Monica by 1890 – I found nothing about her early years – and married assistant postmaster William H. Carr in Los Angeles in 1892. He died of Bright’s Disease six years later. By 1901, Carr had launched her eponymous line of cucumber-based treatments that promised to cure everything from freckles to sunburn. Success came – but at a price. In 1903, Carr wed Maurice Adrian King, a shifty St. Louisan who had come to L.A. to make it big in the nascent telephone industry. The couple picked up 6.5 acres here for a home and chicken ranch and King soon took charge of Carr’s business affairs, which did not go well. Carr, who never took King’s name, sued for divorce in 1910, accusing him of cruelty, infidelity, and plotting to institutionalize her. After years of squabbles, including a wild incident involving Carr, her servant, King, and King’s brother that left King with a bullet wound, the divorce was finalized in 1914. Yet more drama would come: Carr sued her business partner in 1924 over changing the color of her jars from pink to blue, and four years later lost a more serious lawsuit over the death of a Pasadena nurse allegedly poisoned by the mercury in her products. Carr named Carr Drive while subdividing her property in 1922; upon her death, she left her house and 3 acres to the City of Glendale to be used as a park, but her (step?) brother Nathaniel and his wife squatted in the house until the City ousted them in 1951. Carr Park was opened five years later.
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