Originally called St. Louis Street on Ralph Rogers’s 1887 “New York tract” (see Baltimore Street for more), this was changed to Milwaukee Avenue in 1900, as Los Angeles had recently annexed the Garvanza neighborhood and there was already a St Louis Street in Boyle Heights. Usually there are no cute stories when streets are rechristened by city ordinance – while the new names sometimes allude to 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 Boston). As St. Louis and Milwaukee were the two epicenters of the American beer industry, I wouldn’t rule out a sudsy connection here.
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