This was originally called St. Louis Street on Ralph Rogers’s 1887 “New York tract” (see Baltimore Street for more). It was renamed in 1900 after the City of Los Angeles annexed the Garvanza neighborhood because there was already a St Louis Street in Boyle Heights. Usually there are no cute stories when streets are renamed by city ordinance – while sometimes the new names riff off the old ones (e.g., Newton transforming into Newland), mostly it’s humorless work – but back in 1900, someone at the Board of Public Works was being cheeky with at least a couple of Garvanza’s new street names: Rose became Thorne and Boston became Hub (“The Hub” being a nickname for the city of Boston). As St. Louis and Milwaukee were the two epicenters of the American beer industry, I wouldn’t rule out a sudsy connection here.
Find it on the map:
