This was originally plain old B Street, part of an alphabetical street group on the Van Nuys townsite. In December 1916, a year after Los Angeles annexed the Valley, it was announced that these A-B-C street names would be fleshed out to Aetna, Bessemer, Calvert, and so on. “Bessemer” could only have come from Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), the English inventor who created the Bessemer Process, a cost-effective means of smelting iron into steel, in the 1850s. This was a major innovation that revolutionized the steel industry and therefore rail, bridge, and urban construction. No surprise that iron and steel towns called “Bessemer” started popping up all across America – from Colorado to North Carolina and from Alabama to Pennsylvania. The civil engineers who anointed our Bessemer Street might have been directly inspired by one of those towns, by the Bessemer Process, or by the inventor himself.
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