Named for Eddie “Rochester” Anderson (1905-1977), the gravel-voiced comic actor best known for playing Jack Benny’s sidekick on radio, film, and television from 1937 to 1965. Born Edmund Lincoln Anderson into an Oakland-based showbiz family, Anderson made his stage debut in San Francisco in 1919, singing and dancing with his brother Lloyd. His first Los Angeles appearance was in a 1923 revue called Struttin’ Along, after which came years of shows across the country (and in L.A.) with various vaudeville teams. By 1929 he was performing regularly at Central Avenue clubs and working comedy into his dance act. Film work inevitably came, and Anderson appeared in some thirty movies before he was cast as the wisecracking porter Rochester Van Jones on The Jack Benny Program. Anderson’s popularity eventually rivaled Benny’s and for a long while he was the highest-paid black actor in America. Anderson himself lived on this cul-de-sac, which at the time was known as W. 37th Street. (It was renamed two years after his death.) His home was designed in 1940 by Paul R. Williams, L.A.’s preeminent black architect. When Anderson died, his will stated that the mansion be converted into a halfway house for men struggling with substance abuse. More recently it has served as a hostel.
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