Right in the middle of Crescent Heights Blvd., the street changes names twice – to McCarthy Vista and Carrillo Drive – within four short blocks before becoming Crescent Heights again. That’s because these two tiny streets were laid out long before Crescent Heights came down to envelop them. Carthay Center was established in 1922 by a wily developer named J. Harvey McCarthy (1870-1935) – “Carthay” being a posh riff on “McCarthy”. (The Carthay Circle movie theater, remembered for premiering Disney’s Snow White in 1937, eventually gave its name to this neighborhood although the theater itself was demolished in 1969.) McCarthy Vista technically honors McCarthy’s father Daniel O’Connell McCarthy (1829-1919), a Gold Rush miner turned newspaper publisher. (“Dan the Miner”, a bronze statue at McCarthy Vista and San Vicente, stands in tribute to him.) Orphaned at the age of four, Daniel McCarthy grew up in Mississippi and made his way west in 1850. A Southern boy who proudly published a pro-Union newspaper during the Civil War, he spent three decades in San Diego before retiring to Los Angeles in 1901. His son named other Carthay Center streets after California pioneers, with help from the Native Sons of the Golden West (including R.F. del Valle).
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