In October 1888, due to L.A.’s rapid expansion during the previous year’s real estate boom, the city had loads of duplicate street names. (Developers tended to name their own streets without conferring with each other.) That was a problem in that pre-ZIP Code era, so City Council formed a special committee to cull them down. Thus this byway, one of several called “Virginia”, was given a unique new moniker: Toluca Street. It was likely picked by civil engineers out of an “idea file” they kept of potential street names culled from newspapers, books, etc. Toluca, a large city in Mexico, was mentioned in the Los Angeles press a few times in the 1880s – Times correspondent Fannie Brigham Ward wrote a long article about it in 1886 – so that’s probably how our engineers came by the name. (Toluca’s own etymology is murky: some say it references an Aztec god named Tolo; others say it means “where the head is bowed down” in Nahuatl.) As for Toluca Lake, eight miles northwest of here, it was named sometime between 1888 – same as this street! – and 1892.
Find it on the map:
