Fremont Ackerman (1859-1942) surveyed the tract on which Ackerman Drive was born in 1923; it’s unclear whether he was patting himself on the back or if landowner George Barry (see Barryknoll Drive) gave him this street as thanks. Born into a farming family near Columbus, OH, Ackerman graduated from Ohio State in 1883 and immediately entered the field of civil engineering, spending some years in Helena, MT before moving to Los Angeles in 1892 with his wife Abbie (née Coit, 1863-1954) and their baby daughter Ruth. Here his career really took off: Ackerman designed and laid out important developments all across the Southland, from East Pasadena’s Sunny Slope neighborhood in 1895 (where he owned acreage himself) to the core of Manhattan Beach in 1902-1904 to the Venice canals in 1905. Filial footnote: UCLA alumni will remember the campus’s Ackerman Union building – it honors Fremont and Abbie’s son Bill (1902-1988), who as director of students was so central to the school’s culture that he earned the nickname “Mr. UCLA”.
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