Like the Ballona Wetlands and Ballona Creek, this 1998 street owes its name to the old Rancho La Ballona, a 13,920 acre land grant deeded in 1839 to brothers Ygnacio (1797-1878) and Agustín (1794-1865) Machado and father and son Felipe (c. 1771-1856) and Tomás (c. 1793-1875) Talamantes, all of whom had already been farming here for twenty years. There are two schools of thought about Ballona’s etymology. Some say it’s a misspelling of ballena, Spanish for “whale”, presumably spotted off the coast. Doubtful. Others say it’s derived from Baiona, a coastal town in Spain’s Galicia region and allegedly the ancestral home of the Talamantes family. Plausible but unproven. My own crackpot theory is that it may have been a Spanish or Spanglish phoneticization of “bayou”, referring to the marshy landscape. (Not that there wasn’t already a Spanish word for it: ciénaga.) Regardless, Agustín Machado was the only one of the four partners to live on this land: see Machado Road for more. His brother had another rancho called Aguaje de la Centinela. P.S. In the late 19th century, before the City of Los Angeles started annexing nearly every community around it, the “Ballona Township” was an unincorporated area that stretched from Venice to Hollywood!
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