Service Avenue

It’s no service road: this street is named for Richard Webster Service (1867-1944) and William Easson Service (1875-1945), brothers from Ontario, Canada who came to El Monte by 1902 to work as real estate agents. Their biggest client was millionaire E.J. “Lucky” Baldwin: they would sell over 5,000 acres of his La Puente Rancho property, including the tract on which Service Avenue was named in 1907. For reasons unknown to me, the Service Bros. stopped working together in 1915.