Boyce Avenue

Named in 1913 by Allen Ellsworth Boyce (1871-1944) on a tract he owned with Stephen Veselich and Louis & Albert Rigali. Boyce was born outside of Ottumwa, IA and grew up in Concordia, KS. He earned a degree in education in 1892 but quit teaching after three years. In 1894, he married Swedish-born Hilma Byloff (1866-1939); the two would live in Iowa, Colorado, and a Nevada mining town (where they met the Rigalis) before settling in Los Angeles in 1910. Their only child Angela was born here in 1911. Like many L.A. real estate men, Boyce was flush with cash in the Roaring ’20s but went bust during the Great Depression – he even sought mining opportunities back in Nevada. A return to town brought financial relief but further hardship: Angela killed a man with her car in 1937, then Hilma passed away. The 1940 census listed Allen Boyce as a car salesman and living with Angela, who wed Jack S. Lucey the following year. Boyce himself remarried a year before his death.