Named for the fictitious Lady Rowena, the 12th century love interest of Wilfred of Ivanhoe in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819). Not coincidentally, Rowena Avenue was born in 1887 on the Ivanhoe tract, which introduced loads of streets named after Scott characters, books, poems, and locales. Some of them have since lost their monikers: Melrose Avenue (no relation to the other one), named for an abbey near Scott’s home in Scotland, is now Griffith Park Boulevard; Clyde Street, surely for the Scottish river, was coopted into Hyperion; Woodstock Avenue, after another Scott novel, is now Riverside Drive; and there was indeed a Scott Street, but it’s now part of St George.
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