The erstwhile Gage Street was changed to Monette Place in 1916. Despite the lack of that second “n”, the honoree is Mervin Jeremiah Monnette (1847-1931), a banker who lived right around the corner on Western Avenue. Monnette spent the first half of his life in smalltown Ohio (about fifty miles north of Columbus), where he made a fortune in cattle and a local bank. He then made a much, much bigger fortune in 1906 from a Nevada gold mine. Later that year, he and his first wife Olive (1849-1912) and son Orra (1873-1936) came to Los Angeles and the banking continued. Orra would become even more prominent than his father, and in November 1922 he founded a brand new financial institution: Bank of America. (Dad quickly signed on as a director.) Before you get too excited about the Monnettes’ place in banking history, the Bank of America you know today really got its start in San Francisco as the Bank of Italy. It absorbed L.A.’s Bank of America bit by bit between 1924 and 1927, with Orra scoring a sweet VP position in the process.
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