This street honors a guy who never lived here: Herman Theodore Silvius (1863-1934). The year was 1921 and Silvius, a Sacramento bookbinder and stationer, was one of eight partners – most of them Sacramentans – behind an 80 acre tract called Ocean View Heights. (The group also drilled an oil well here.) I have no idea why, of these eight, Silvius alone received a namesake avenue. (There was an Ernst Ave. on the tract map, named for partner A.G. Ernst, but it never materialized.) Herman Silvius was born in Oslo, Norway to Swedish parents, who brought him to America when he was a child. He grew up in Chicago and relocated to San Francisco in 1887. A year later, he married fellow Swedish American Alma Berglund (1870-1953). They settled in Sacramento in 1893 and raised five kids there.
Find it on the map:
