One of L.A.’s oldest named streets, right after Main, Commercial Street – so called because it was set up for businesses – was listed in an ad in the June 19th, 1852 Los Angeles Star, the city’s first newspaper. As the Star had already been in press for thirteen months, we could conclude that this street was named around the time of that ad. However, the Star was just a four-page broadsheet that mostly published non-local news, since L.A. was then so small that nobody needed journalists to tell them what was happening around town, so it’s possible that Commercial Street was christened before 1852. And before you remind me that DTLA streets like Flower, Hope, and so on were laid out in 1849 on the Ord survey map, they were almost certainly just “paper streets” for many years, making Commercial Street older in terms of real-world usage.
Find it on the map:
