Named for misguided entrepreneur Frank Lawson Bailey (1848-1890), a New Jersey native who in 1876 bought a share in the Brooklyn Heights tract (Cesar Chavez Ave. was called Brooklyn Ave. back then), which gave us his namesake street. Bailey also took over a cigar store and a sewing machine shop that autumn. The following year, Bailey “ran away and smashed things badly” at the sewing machine shop and eventually headed to Northern California, where he married Mary E. Yontz in 1881 and set up a dry goods store in Chico. Sadly, Mary died in an insane asylum in 1885, which set Bailey on a path of self-destruction, drinking heavily and racking up debts. (By this point he was working as a stockbroker in San Francisco.) In July 1889, Bailey forged his friend Anthony Sweeney’s signature on a $2,000 stock sale, left a phony suicide note, then absconded to L.A. with Sweeney’s money. The law caught up with him and in November he was sentenced to two years at San Francisco’s House of Correction. Those suicide threats may have been real: Bailey died in prison just two months later.
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