Unlikely as it may seem, Malabar Street probably takes its name from a neighborhood in Mumbai, India. The street was laid out in July 1887 on the Ganahl tract, owned not by Ganahl Street‘s namesake but by Edward Records, for whom East L.A.’s Record Avenue is (mis)named. At the time, India was still under British rule, Mumbai was known as Bombay, and Malabar Hill, one of its poshest neighborhoods, was regularly mentioned in Los Angeles newspapers. Malabar Street wasn’t even the first time the name was used locally: in December 1886, a different set of developers opened the Malabar tract in South Pasadena. Neither the Philadelphia-raised Records nor his Wisconsinite partner Clarence J. Richards had any ties to India – or, for that matter, to the inspirations for the tract’s other streets: Fairmount, Golden (now Houston), Boulder, Folsom, and Cincinnati. My guess is that these names were chosen simply because they sounded nice and were easy to remember.
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