L.A.’s two San Vicente Boulevards are five miles apart at their closest points. Where they ever meant to connect? Hard to say. The one between Brentwood and Santa Monica – see San Vicente Boulevard (Westside) – came first, in 1905, as a standalone street. This one got its start in 1922 on a Mid-City tract owned by the Rimpau family; a real estate ad that April promised that this new San Vicente was “continuing the extension of this double boulevard to the sea”, suggesting that someone had farfetched hopes of connecting it to its twin out west. At any rate, Mid-City’s San Vicente would gobble up a couple of other streets: up until 1929, the stretch between Fairfax and La Cienega was called Eulalia Boulevard, presumably after legendary SoCal centenarian Eulalia Peréz de Guillén. (This was the doing of Carthay Center developer J. Harvey McCarthy, who named his streets after historic Californians.) Meanwhile, since the road straddled the Pacific Electric tracks up leading up to the Sherman rail yards – today’s Pacific Design Center – San Vicente originally went no further than Santa Monica Boulevard. North of that intersection, it was known as Clark Street until adopting the San Vicente name in 1968. It’s still called Clark north of Sunset.
Find it on the map:
