The chances that Occidental Boulevard has anything to do with Occidental College: slim to none. After Oxy’s original Boyle Heights building burned down in January 1896, its board of trustees began searching for a new location for the school. Occidental Blvd. was physically laid out in the spring of 1897, so it could have been optimistically named on paper a year earlier, during that search, but it’s unlikely; although Inglewood and Glendale were both contenders for the new campus, there’s no evidence of this neighborhood ever having been in the running. At any rate, Oxy’s trustees decided upon Highland Park later in 1896, and the college found its forever home in Eagle Rock in 1912. So why is this street called Occidental Blvd.? Well, at the time its first segment was graded (between present-day Beverly and 6th), it was next to the city’s western boundary. “Occidental” means “western”, so there you have it. From the Curious Names file: The stretch of Occidental north of Beverly was previously called Fudickar, King, and Sugg. Who wouldn’t want to live on Fudickar Street?
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