The story behind the Eastside’s numbered avenues (16 through 67) begins in early 1897. Due to rapid and uncoordinated development, Los Angeles was teeming with duplicate street names, so the City formed a commission to change some 300 of them. Highland Park, annexed by the City a little over a year earlier, had added even more duplicates to the mix. Perhaps exhausted by thinking up new monikers, the street name commission proposed an ordinal series east of the river: Water Street would be renamed “First Way”, Hayes Street would become “Second Way”, and so on. Alternatively, the streets could be called “Way 1”, “Way 2”, etc. Eastside residents objected, preferring the fancier term “Avenue”. The commission made the logical counteroffer of “Avenue 1”, “Avenue 2”, and so forth, but residents objected once again – as the Los Angeles Herald put it, they didn’t like “being set off as a little country town. They were part of this great metropolitan city and wanted to be treated accordingly.” Somehow this translated as starting the series at Avenue 18. (Avenues 16 and 17 were added in 1904.) Why they chose this particular number is a mystery.
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