In 1897, the former Clarence Street and Kansas Avenue were blended into a new street: Cimarron. It was coined by a special city commission tasked with renaming over 300 Los Angeles roadways. (We had a lot of duplicate and excessive street names back then.) Members of the commission intentionally added more Spanish names in deference to L.A.’s past – and cimarrón is Spanish for “feral” or “untamed”. (Spanish colonizers in the Caribbean used the word for runaway cattle, horses… and slaves.) Although Oklahoma’s Cimarron River is better known, I posit that the L.A. commission took the name from the city of Cimarron, Kansas, knowing that they were deleting Kansas Avenue.
Find it on the map:
