This 1994 street is a tribute to earlier developer Peter Nicholas Snyder (c. 1882-1940), a rather sketchy character. Born Panagiotis Nikolaos Sinodinos in Tripoli, Greece, by 1905 he was working in Wichita as a middleman for his fellow Greek immigrants – hooking them up with railroad jobs and occasionally ripping them off. In 1906, he married Fannie Craven, a rich Kansas widow some 25 years his senior. They were living in Bishop, CA in August 1908 when Fannie was shot to death in a roadside robbery; Snyder was charged with facilitating her murder but the case was dismissed for reasons unknown. (He looked guilty to me.) Snyder moved to Los Angeles in 1910 and wed Clara Hindman that year. They had a son, Nicholas, but the marriage didn’t last. Snyder soon started making his name as a road contractor while peddling a blatant lie that he’d won a gold medal in race-walking at the 1906 Olympics in Athens – this whopper even made it into his obituary. In 1918, he married his third wife Amalia de la Fuente (1888-1977); they had one daughter, Beatriz, in 1920. Snyder then got into the real estate boom in East L.A. and Monterey Park, where in 1928 he opened the Midwick View Estates tract around the corner from here. Despite his dubious deeds, you can thank the man for giving this city its signature “Cascades” fountain and “El Encanto” building. Fotini Place honors his mother.
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