In 1897, the former Clarence Street and Kansas Avenue were blended into a new street: Cimarron. The name was coined by a special city commission tasked with rechristening over 300 Los Angeles roadways. (We had a lot of duplicate and excessive street names back then.) The 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 our commissioners actually took the name from the city of Cimarron, Kansas, since they were deleting Kansas Avenue and weren’t averse to the occasional inside reference.
Find it on the map:
