This street was born in 1915 as Warner Avenue, a nod to Charles Henry Warner (1872-1944), speedometer manufacturer and early Culver City investor. Soon after, the City of Los Angeles annexed most of the land that the street lay on – and since its name conflicted with an existing Warner Avenue near USC, it had to be changed. (Ironically, that other Warner no longer exists.) The source of the new moniker could only be Watseka, IL, an Iroquois County town some 80 miles south of Chicago. My guess is that someone with the City of L.A. suggested “Watseka” simply because it started with the same two letters as “Warner” – they did that a lot back then. As for the Illinois burg, it was named in 1864 after a well-known Potawatomi woman whose name was actually Watch-e-kee or Watchekee (c. 1810 – c. 1873). Although there’s almost zero hard data on her, her first husband Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard was a credible witness and he told an Iroquois County historian her saga in 1880.
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