Yosemite Drive was originally called Sycamore Avenue. When the City of Los Angeles annexed Eagle Rock in 1923, the street’s name had to be changed to avoid postal conflicts with Hollywood’s own Sycamore. “Yosemite” is a no-brainer name for a California street; in this instance, it might have been chosen because a recently-developed tract to the west had introduced a bunch of NorCal-inspired byways: Mendocino, Petaluma, Sausalito, and Tiburon streets have since lost their identities but Shasta Circle and Wawona Street remain. (The connection makes more sense if you keep in mind that this was long before the Glendale Freeway would cut that tract in two.) As for the etymology of “Yosemite”, coined for its selfsame valley in 1851, that’s a matter of dispute: some claim it’s a corruption of the Miwok term for “grizzly bear” while others believe it was Miwok for “killers” and referred to a fierce native tribe, the Ahwahneechee, who lived in said valley.
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