Landowner Dr. Isaac Saylin (1873-1941) named this street in April 1905 – during the wildest chapter of his life. The Latvian-born Saylin immigrated to Buffalo, NY in the early 1890s. There he married Lena Levin and worked as a physician and pharmacist while Lena raised their three kids. Then came September 12th, 1901, when Saylin was arrested in connection with the assassination of President McKinley. (Betcha didn’t see that one coming!) In that era of yellow journalism, facts are hard to verify, but the good doctor was accused of conspiring with McKinley’s shooter Leon Czolgosz and with Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist whom Czolgosz said inspired him. Saylin, who really did know Goldman (I’m not sure about Czolgosz), was cleared of all charges but fled Buffalo in March 1902 when he was offered a job as surgeon with the Santa Fe Railway in Albuquerque. A year later, he took his family to Pasadena and set up a new pharmacy; it soon burned down. Then Lena divorced him in 1904. Then things got really crazy: In September 1905, four months after Lena unsuccessfully tried to vacate the divorce decree, she added gasoline to a lit stove and burned to death. Dr. Saylin wasn’t exactly heartbroken: he took a new wife, Emma Wiesh, five months later. The remainder of his life was comparatively quiet.
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