Rev. Charles Warren Hollister (1858-1935) laid out this street in 1902 on a tract he owned with Thomas S. Wadsworth. (They also developed part of Pismo Beach that year; the city of Hollister is unrelated.) C.W. Hollister was an eastern Ohio boy who pursued a career in the Episcopal Church. He graduated from Allegheny College in 1883, earned PhD and STB degrees at the Boston University School of Theology in 1885, and was then ordained. He was rector at St. Paul’s in Akron, OH when he married local lady Cora Commins (1862-1940) in 1894. Four years later, the couple and their kids – they would ultimately have six – left Akron for Pasadena; Hollister gave up preaching for law and became a licensed CA attorney in 1900. The reasons behind this dramatic pivot are unknown to me – midlife crisis, perhaps? – but Hollister did return to the pulpit in 1917 when he became rector at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Venice. The family’s ties to this area began in 1901 when they built a beach house on Hart Ave.; eventually they lived full-time in South Venice (today’s Marina Peninsula).
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