Named in 1923 by Jacob Stern (1859-1934), who owned a tract here with his sons Harold and Eugene. Stern emigrated from Coburg, Germany in 1884 and had settled in Fullerton by 1889, when he opened a dry goods store with his cousin Joseph Goodman. Two years later, he married Sarah Laventhal (1870-1933), an L.A. girl. Stern got rich from his store and got even richer in real estate, so in 1904, he, Sarah, and their four kids moved to a lushly-landscaped five acre estate, “Casa de las Palmas“, on the southwest corner of Hollywood and Vine – it took up the entire block. They lived there until 1928, by which time Stern had already sold off most of the block to fellow developers during Hollywood’s rapid urbanization that decade. (Stern’s own high-rise, the Hollywood Plaza, opened in 1925 and still stands on Vine.) Jacob Stern & Sons subdivided neighborhoods throughout the Southland.
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