This was originally called Summit Avenue. City Council replaced that generic name with the more exotic-sounding Elberon Avenue in 1917 as Los Angeles, which had just taken over San Pedro, already had too many Summit-themed streets. So where did “Elberon” come from? There could be only one source: Elberon, NJ. Established in 1872, this Jersey Shore community owes its unusual moniker to early landowner Lewis Blanchard Brown (1813-1900): “Elbe-” is a phoneticization of his first two initials (L.B.) and “-ron” is derived from Brown. (I swear I didn’t make this up.) Whoever suggested the name for this street either hailed from the Garden State or remembered Elberon as the site of President James A. Garfield’s 1881 death. P.S. The map below only displays one block of Elberon Ave. For reasons unknown to me, my mapping tool refuses to save an image of the entire street.
Find it on the map:
