The word “heliotrope” comes from the Greek for “turned towards the sun” and is the name of both a gemstone (also called bloodstone) and a flowering plant. In the case of Heliotrope Drive – christened in 1906 on the Windermere Park tract south of Melrose – I can affirm that the plant is the inspiration. How do I know? Because of two other streets on the tract: Wisteria Drive and Verbena Drive (since renamed Alexandria Avenue and Berendo Street, respectively). Heliotrope flowers are typically purplish – as are wisteria and verbena. So the Windermere Park guys were clearly going for a theme here. As for why those other streets lost their names, it was a matter of streamlining: in the old days, when real estate developers named their tracts’ roadways whatever they wished, the City of Los Angeles started having issues with streets changing identities every few blocks. Berendo, for example, consisted of seven separate segments with seven different names (including Verbena) until it was consolidated in 1912.
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