This street was introduced on a 1923 tract officially owned by Citizens Trust & Savings Bank. Typically when a bank or trust company is listed as owner, it means they’re just the mortgage lender for the anonymous individuals who actually own the tract and thus it’s hard to find any personal meaning behind its street names. Indeed, there might be no meaning at all: salespeople could have named them arbitrarily. Five such inscrutable streets came out of this 1923 tract: Alcott, Alvira, Cashio, Horner, and Key (now Pickford Place). In the case of Alcott, however, there’s an intriguing detail: the 1924 Los Angeles City Directory listed seven people by that surname, one of whom was Geneva Alcott (1890-1985), a bookkeeper for… Citizens Trust & Savings Bank. “Aha!” you say – but it could still be a coincidence, as bank officers really weren’t tasked with naming streets. Unless one of them was also a landowner here, which is possible. In short, Geneva Alcott rates a solid “maybe” as Alcott Street’s namesake. Born Geneva Smith in Port Huron, MI, she was a small-time soprano who married John Alcott in 1915. Eight years later, she was single, living in L.A., and working for Citizens Trust. She tied the knot with Howard Browne in January 1924, divorced him three months later(!), and moved to Pasadena. She married a third time in 1935 – to violinist Louis Raymond Townsend, with whom she had performed for years – and ultimately wound up in San Diego.
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