The irony of a 20-foot-wide alley being called “Speedway” wasn’t lost on observers even back in 1903, when the street was so named. And yet there was a method to the madness of whoever christened Speedway – most likely Venice founder Abbot Kinney, who was developing this neighborhood in the early 1900s when it was still called Ocean Park. As a packed-dirt road in a land of sand and boardwalk, Speedway was designed for local businesses to transport groceries and other goods to those who lived or summered in the cottages here, and was indeed the speediest means for doing so. As one 1903 journalist wrote: “This narrow roadway is, in certain respects, the most necessary and important street in the city.” Yet it took nearly two years of promises and plans before it was finally paved.
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