The Hancock family, whose name lives on in posh Hancock Park, once owned the 4,439 acre Rancho La Brea, which stretched all the way out here – two miles away from the tar pits. Patriarch Henry Hancock (1822-1883) was a Harvard-educated lawyer and surveyor who came to Los Angeles in 1850 and amassed great power. He married Ida Haraszthy (1843-1913), the daughter of Hungarian aristocrats, in 1863, by which point he had finagled a deal that gave him and his siblings ownership of the vast rancho. Although Henry left his own heirs in debt, Ida proved herself a clever steward of their share of the rancho: assisted by her son George Allan Hancock (1875-1965), she turned the family fortunes around – especially once oil was discovered on the land. In 1919, after the oil had been drained, G. Allan subdivided the property as Hancock Park and named Rossmore Avenue after his late mother and her second husband. Back here in WeHo, in 1906, Ida donated a church organ to the St. Victor Catholic Church right around the corner on Holloway Drive. One might thus argue that Hancock Avenue, named the following year, honors her directly. But the children of Henry Hancock’s sister Adeline Quint actually owned this corner of Rancho La Brea: Adeline’s daughter Lucy J. Ludlow was listed as a co-owner of the tract on which Hancock Ave. was born, as was a “Mary E. Hancock”, whose name is otherwise absent from the Hancock family tree. I assume the latter was written in error and was meant to refer to someone else. The tract’s developer was Arna A. Barnett, who lived on the street.
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