Seigneur Avenue

This 1927 street honors William Eugene Seigneur (1885-1960), a real estate salesman who at the time was working for this neighborhood’s developer Walter H. Leimert. (Several streets here are named for Leimert people: see Williams Place and O’Sullivan Drive.) Will Seigneur hailed from Fulton County, OH, one of thirteen surviving kids born to a French dad and an American mom. He, his wife Ethel (1887-1958), and their only child Kenneth (1908-1990) operated a grocery store in nearby Adrian, MI before relocating to the rural San Fernando Valley in 1919. After some years as a rancher, in 1926 Seigneur decided to get into L.A.’s red-hot real estate boom, but the Depression would downgrade him to a carpenter by 1933. He and Ethel spent their final years in Mentone, CA, no doubt haunted by a terrible 1957 accident in which their 13-year-old grandson Robert killed his 7-year-old sister Gayle with a souvenir WWII pistol.