This one’s an educated guess. Fulton Avenue was named by city ordinance in 1917, after Los Angeles annexed the SFV and had to change all the Valley street names that conflicted with those elsewhere in the city. In this case, part of this street was called Walter Avenue; another part, Cortez Avenue. So who or what inspired “Fulton” as the replacement? It could have been anyone or anywhere – Fulton’s a common name. But seeing as how several Valley streets borrowed the monikers of L.A. bureaucrats who were in office at the time (e.g., Topham, Woodley, Langdon), it’s possible that Fulton Lane (1881-1946), who in 1917 was the powerful president of the Board of Public Utilities, is our namesake. Lane was an Ohio-born civil engineer who worked on the Los Angeles Aqueduct and was an ally of then-mayor Frederic Woodman – that is, until Woodman eliminated Lane’s salary in 1918, at which point Lane resigned.
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