University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Preserving street names in Los Angeles, California

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Preserving street names in Los Angeles, California

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Content i

PRESERVING STREET NAMES IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

By

Melanie Emas

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF ARCHITECUTRE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF HERITAGE CONSERVATION

December 2017

Copyright 2017 Melanie Emas
ii

Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets.
Jacobs, 1961:39

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing this thesis was no easy feat. After two years of coursework pursuing my dual
degrees in Master of Planning and Master of Heritage Conservation and one year of writing this
thesis, I can be proud of all I have accomplished. However, I did not do it alone. I would like to
take this opportunity to acknowledge the people behind these degrees that fully supported and
encouraged me to follow my passion in exploring the nexus between heritage conservation and
urban planning.
I would first like to thank the loving support of my family, especially my parents, who
were extremely patient with me while on this journey. Thank you for always listening to me
when I felt lost and giving me the confidence to follow my dreams and passions. Without this
support, I would not be where I am today.
I would also like to take this opportunity to offer my gratitude to my thesis committee
members, Trudi Sandmeier, Director of Graduate Programs in Heritage Conservation and
Associate Professor of Practice in Architecture; Kathryn Horak, Heritage Conservation faculty
member; and Dr. David Sloane, Professor in urban planning in the Sol Price School of Public
Policy for their many hours of review and valuable insight as heritage conservation and history
professionals that they contributed to the writing of this thesis. There is no right way to write a
thesis and I am grateful for your patience as I formulated my thesis.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EPIGRAPH ................................................................................................................................... ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iii
LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................v
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. vii

INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER 1: HISTORY OF STREET NAMING .....................................................................4
Naming North America ........................................................................................................4
Street Patterns ......................................................................................................................9
Naming California .............................................................................................................15
Naming Los Angeles ..........................................................................................................18
Street Name/Change Policies .............................................................................................24

CHAPTER 2: THEORECTICAL FRAMEWORK OF STREET NAMES ..........................27
Street Names as a Vehicle of Power and Authority ...........................................................30
Street Names as Identity and Heritage ...............................................................................34
Street Names as Location ...................................................................................................36
Street Names as Navigation ...............................................................................................37
Street Names as Placemaking ............................................................................................40
Significance of Renaming Streets ......................................................................................42

CHAPTER 3: CASE STUDIES IN LOS ANGELES: BROOKLYN AVENUE AND
ELYSIAN PARK AVENUE........................................................................................................44
Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar Chavez Avenue ......................................................................44
Elysian Park Avenue to Vin Scully Avenue ......................................................................52

CHAPTER 4: RECOMMENDATIONS ....................................................................................59
Existing Definitions and Guidelines for Evaluating Historic Places .................................59
Existing Preservation Resources in Los Angeles ..............................................................61
How Other Cities are Addressing the Historic Value of Street Names ............................64
Suggestions ........................................................................................................................69
Resources for Researching Street Names ..........................................................................72

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................74

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................76
v

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1: Carte de la Nouvelle France ......................................................................................... 6
Figure 1.2: The town of Boston in New England ........................................................................... 7
Figure 1.3: A plan of the city of Philadelphia ................................................................................. 9
Figure 1.4: Street Pattern of Philadelphia ..................................................................................... 10
Figure 1.5: Street Pattern of Washington D.C. ............................................................................. 11
Figure 1.6: Street Pattern of New York City ................................................................................ 12
Figure 1.7: Street Pattern of Boston .............................................................................................. 14
Figure 1.8: Portola’s Route from San Diego to Luis Obispo ........................................................ 15
Figure 1.9: Spanish Map of North America .................................................................................. 16
Figure 1.10: Map of the street pattern and boundaries for Pueblo de Los Angeles and the caption
that appeared with the map when published ......................................................................... 18
Figure 1.11: Pueblo of Los Angeles ............................................................................................. 20
Figure 1.12: Section of E.O.C. Ord’s First Map of the City of Los Angeles ............................... 21
Figure 1.13: Map of the City of Los Angeles ............................................................................... 22
Figure 1.14: Detail of Proposed Street Openings and Widenings of Downtown District in the
Major Traffic Street Plan………………………………………………………………………...24
Figure 2.1: View of Temple street looking west from Temple Block .......................................... 29
Figure 2.2: Freienwalder Str at Genslerstr. outside of Berlin-Hohenschonhausen Memorial,
former Stassi prison .............................................................................................................. 32
Figure 2.3: 2000 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard ............................................................... 33
Figure 2.4: Los Angeles Olympic City ......................................................................................... 35
Figure 2.5: L.A. Metro Art initiative: Eagle Rock ........................................................................ 40
Figure 2.6: Manhole in Portland, Oregon ..................................................................................... 42
Figure 3.1: Los Angeles and Brooklyn Heights from the east ...................................................... 45
Figure 3.2: Map of the streets that make up East Cesar Chavez Avenue ..................................... 46
Figure 3.3: Brooklyn Theatre in Boyle Heights ............................................................................ 47
Figure 3.4: Brooklyn Avenue becomes Cesar E. Chavez Avenue ............................................... 49
Figure 3.5: Martin Luther King Boulevard ................................................................................... 51
Figure 3.6: Our Lady of Guadalupe Mural on Cesar Chavez Avenue .......................................... 52
Figure 3.7: Elysian Park post card ................................................................................................ 53
vi

Figure 3.8: North Broadway entrance to Elysian Park ................................................................. 54
Figure 3.9: Dominquez Family ..................................................................................................... 55
Figure 3.10: Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, looking north ............................................................ 56
Figure 3.11: Vin Scully Avenue Dedication ................................................................................. 57
Figure 4.1: Indian Alley in Downtown Los Angeles .................................................................... 63
Figure 4.2: Murals in Indian Alley ............................................................................................... 64
Figure 4.3: Honorary Street Names Shakespeare Garden at Sheridan Road and Garrett Place in
Evanston, Illinois .................................................................................................................. 66
Figure 4.4: Honorary Street Name Humphrey Bogart Place at 103 St and Broadway ................. 67
Figure 4.5: Plan de la Nouvelle Orleans ....................................................................................... 69
Figure 4.6: Pages from the Kimball Guide to Street Names in Los Angeles ............................... 73

vii

ABSTRACT

Street names are an important aspect of any community. Street names not only provide
means for direction but they also provide communities with a sense of place and understanding
of their neighborhood history. Currently, there is no formal protection for safeguarding street
names in Los Angeles and the process for renaming streets is ministerial, a top-down process
with little community outreach required. How can planners and preservationists create tools to
preserve important street names while also creating a more structured program to rename streets
that allow for more community outreach and cultural awareness?
This thesis explores the possibility of a formalized street name preservation program in
Los Angeles using recent street name changes in the City as case studies and looking to other
cities as best practices. This paper first examines the history and theory of street names giving
the context as to why we should preserve them. By using examples of recent street changes in
Los Angeles, this paper studies how other cities are addressing historic street name changes and
how Los Angeles streets could have benefited from said programs. Planners and preservationists
need to develop a comprehensive street name preservation program that not only protects historic
street names from being changed but also involves diverse communities in the decision to change
names by requiring community outreach. A street name preservation program may be an
effective strategy in recognizing, honoring, and preserving a layered history of Los Angeles.

1

INTRODUCTION

There are many ways to identify and preserve historic resources in the United States.
With more traditional resources, typically physical structures or buildings, there are preservation
policies on the local, state, and federal levels that are in place to protect the integrity of these
places. The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966 was implemented to preserve
historical, architectural, archeological, and cultural properties.
1
The NHPA established: the
National Register of Historic Places, the definitive list of all historically significant places,
structures, and artifacts; encouraged historic districts; authorized enabling legislation to fund
preservation projects; encouraged the establishment of State Historic Preservation Offices
(SHPOs); and established the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), an
independent federal agency “that promotes the preservation, enhancement, and productive use of
our nation’s historic resources, and advises the President and Congress on national historic
preservation policy.”
2
The NHPA declares that:

1. the spirit and direction of the Nation are founded upon and reflected in its historic
heritage;
2. the historical and cultural foundations of the Nation should be preserved as a living
part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of orientation to the
American people;
3. historic properties significant to the Nation's heritage are being lost or substantially
altered, often inadvertently, with increasing frequency; [and]
4. the preservation of this irreplaceable heritage is in the public interest so that its vital
legacy of cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, economic, and energy benefits
will be maintained and enriched for future generations of Americans…”
3

Established as part of the NPHA, the National Register of Historic Places defines historic
places as “tangible links with the Nation’s past that help provide a sense of identity and
stability.”
4
The NPHA only identifies historic properties as the cultural resources the law
protects. Under this assumption, cultural resources not linked to properties are not considered
historic nor are they eligible to receive protection or benefits. This assumption disqualifies

1
“The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966,” Public Law 102-575, National Park Service, accessed July 16,
2017,https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/nhpa1966.htm.
2
"About ACHP." ACHP | About ACHP | General Information, accessed July 16, 2017,
http://www.achp.gov/aboutachp.html.
3
“The National Historic Preservation of 1966,” Public Law 102-575, Section 1, Part (b)(1) - (4), National Park
Service, Accessed July 16, 2017, https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/nhpa1966.htm.
4
U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, The National Register of Historic Places.
2

intangible historic resources such as street names and another place-based resources that
contribute the cultural identity of neighborhoods.
In 1980, an amendment was made to the NHPA that requested the study of “the
intangible elements of our cultural heritage.” This request called “to preserve, conserve, and
encourage the continuation of the diverse traditional prehistoric, historic, ethnic, and folk cultural
traditions that underlie and are a living expression of our American heritage.”
5
This study was
executed in 1983 by Ormond Loomis and resulted in the publication titled Cultural
Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United States. The study outlines that
the NHPA “fails to provide clear coverage for the full range of cultural resources in the United
States…intangible elements of our cultural heritage fall outside the scope of this law.”
6
The
authors describe cultural conservation as a concept for a systematic approach to the protection of
cultural heritage.
7

Fifty years after it was adopted, the NHPA remains the basis of cultural resource
management. Since its inception, the heritage conservation field has made extraordinary efforts
in order to become more inclusive of diverse resources, including, but not limited to, accepting
of cultural significant places as historic resources. Often, culturally significant resources do not
meet the same level of integrity standards that more traditional resources do. However, the field
is gradually developing a broader understanding of what it means to qualify as historic. In
California, the recent Latinos in Twentieth Century California, a National Register of Historic
Places Context Statement, is just one of several examples where the field is progressing towards
recognizing the importance of diverse cultures. However, there is still more to be done in
evaluating historic resources of cultural and social value.
The Heritage Conservation field has struggled with how to address resources with
intangible history, particularly the integrity of materials linked to these places. Criteria for
determining historical significance have traditionally emphasized monuments rather than the
everyday objects and places associated with everyday urban social life. Although the material of
these resources does not meet traditional standards of integrity, it should not undermine the

5
“The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966,” Section 502.
6
Loomis, Ormond H., coordinator. Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United States.
Washington: Library of Congress, 1983.
7
The limitation of this report was that it specifically addressed the need of protecting intangible heritage of
American Folklife history. In 1990, the National Park Service augmented the 1983 report and published national
Register Bulletin 38, Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties, which excluded
all properties, and intangible histories, not only those associated with traditional ethic groups.
3

importance of local identification and public knowledge these places represent. Placed-based
histories, such as street names, need to be evaluated based on new standards created on the local,
state, and federal levels. These new standards should be sensitive to the history and interpretation
of the historical environments of our cities.
Since the initial goal of historic preservation was to protect physical fabric and
landscapes of historical and architectural significant places, guidelines have been efficient in
protecting such resources. Although the heritage conservation field is generally moving toward
including more diversity in the resources it seeks to protect, existing public policy lacks guidance
and fails to provide a clear and concise understand of how to evaluate and protect culturally
significant histories without tangible properties, such as street names. A new challenge of the
field is to advocate for the place-based intangible? histories that are also important to the social
and cultural history of communities around America.
This thesis intends to provide a historical, theoretically, and practical analysis of why and
how street names should be preserved. It will examine how streets were named in the United
States, California, and finally in Los Angeles. It will look at the elements of street names that
give them meaning and thus render them worth preserving. Case studies such as Cesar Chavez
Avenue and Vin Scully Avenue discuss the long-lasting significance street names of on
communities long after they are replaced. In doing so, this thesis will provide a more
comprehensive understanding of street name preservation at any municipal level and can be
presented as a tool for a more inclusive preservation program. Through this examination, the
notion of what is historically important or architecturally significant can be expanded to
acknowledge meaning and memory in the ordinary places we live in.

4

CHAPTER 1
History of Street Naming

“Names are always shadows of the men who give them.” –George Stewart
8

Names are representative of the people who name them and how they interpreted the
world around them. Before Los Angeles was the city it is today, the land was home to many
different cultures who left their imprint in history via place naming and street naming. Although
not every one of these place names was recorded in history, each generation added their own
names, building on our rich cultural heritage. Over these generations, some of those old names
were lost; often they were reinterpreted into the names we recognize today.
This chapter intends to give a brief history of street naming in the United States. It
describes how different cultures named the lands the inhabited, explored, exploited, and/or ruled
beginning with the Native American people through the decades of European and American
colonization. The beginning of the chapter looks at how English, French, and Spanish customs
on the East Coast influenced naming practices in the United States. Building on this idea, the
latter half of the chapter specifically focuses on naming practices in California and Los Angeles
to underscore the importance of street names today.

Naming North America
No one knows exactly when humans first came or who gave the first names. However,
long before European settlers came to the New World, the Native Americans were forming
tribes, hunting, and prospering on the land for thousands of years. As evidenced by the quantity
of Native American place names, Native Americans were some of the first people to name places
in North America. Typically, tribes gave names to places based on an incident or by large
landmarks. Incident-based place naming refers to something that happened at a place such as
Patowmeck or “burning pines” which tells the story of how a fire broke out near the river.
9

Naming for landmarks had a different, directional purpose of telling tribes where they were

8
Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-naming in the United States, 85. The majority of the
information in this chapter is derived from this source unless otherwise noted.
9
Potomac is the European spelling of Patowmeck.
5

based on the places that were around them and what they could find there. For example, Tacoma
has been translated to mean Big Snow Mountain and Yosemite, Grizzly Bear.
Because native languages were rarely written, many of the names of places were passed
down orally from generation to generation. As a result, when the Spanish, English, and French
came to the New World in the Eighteenth Century, they had a difficult time transcribing Native
American names. Native American place names were never intended to be written and when
Europeans transcribed those names into their respective languages, making it easier for them to
pronounce and draw on maps, they adapted and reshaped the names into their own language,
altering them to the point where the names started to sound more European than Native
American. Instances where Europeans kept the Native American sounding names, either for
exoticism or lack of ability or time to come up with a new name, can be found in twenty-six
states, eighteen of the greatest cities, most of the larger lakes and rivers, mountains, and
thousands of smaller towns. Though the literal translation of the Native American meaning may
have been forgotten, the meaning of the name is now in some cases more than the words
composing it.
There are two types of Native American place names: traditional and derivations.
10

Traditional Native American place names were used in Native American languages; these have
since been loosely transcribed into English. Examples include Chesapeake Bay, Chicago, and
Tucson. Native American derivations are place names derived from native languages of the area,
appropriating the language to create a new place name, regardless of the name the tribes may
actually have used. Sometimes the name is remodeled in English (or another European language)
as if to hide its native origin. In other cases, there are names that have been invented but
designed to appear Native American. Regardless of whether they are original to the Native
American language each of these names tells a unique story of how the Native Americans
interacted with their environment, and how the Europeans interpreted these interactions.

10
William Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
2004), 878.
6

When Europeans began to occupy North America, they came with their own naming
traditions that greatly shaped the naming culture of the United States. Despite commonalities
between European explorers coming to the land, there were vast differences in how they settled
the land and as a result named the land. While the French and Spanish explored the land, the
English settled. This important distinction translates into the permanency of names. While the
French and Spanish explored the land, sending maps with names of places back to their home
countries, the English settled the land and where they settled people spoke the names of places
daily. By nature, naming a place or a natural feature is an assertion of dominance, however; the
English-named places and features became a part of the collective memory of the colonies. On
the other hand, French and Spanish names that were placed on land that was not settled were
more than often forgotten or renamed.
11

In the English colonies, there were two differences in how the land was settled that are
reflected in the naming history: village and plantation settlements. In the village setting, the

11
Another issue the French and Spanish experienced was the fact that explorers were not always able to read and
write which would have made the names verbal and more likely to be forgotten.
Figure 1.1: Carte de la Nouvelle France, 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
(https://lccn.loc.gov/73694638).
7

colonists settled around a church or a local tavern that would later become the name of the town,
or they would adopt a Native American name. People of power would name large/important
places most often after royalty to honor their English heritage. The street naming process would
have been democratic; street names would have been named by the common people who lived
there. In smaller villages, there was no need to name streets because everyone knew where
everything was in the village. Roads leading to and from the village were naturally named for the
town to which they led; these names remained as streets were formed. In addition, immigrants
brought their names and applied their own culture to the places they lived. For example,
Brooklyn comes from the Dutch name Bruekelyn in Amsterdam. Some of New York’s most
famous streets have Dutch origins. Moreover, New York, first called New Amsterdam before the
Figure 1.2: The town of Boston in New England, 1725. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map
Division; control number 88693226 (https://lccn.loc.gov/88693226).
8

English settled, was the first city to have regularly named streets. In 1658, notaries began to
mention streets by their names.
12

An important change in the naming tradition occurred after the American Revolution in
the eighteenth century.
13
When the Americans won their independence, there was a heated
debate on whether they should keep or discard the names that honored English royalty.
14

Americans thought that there should be a major shift in the names of their states but it was
eventually decided that to change names of states and cities would be considered a sign of
weakness and out of defiance to the British they kept the names that reflected their English
heritage.
15
On the other hand, street names were more malleable and were renamed to honor the
new American way of life. High Street was converted to Main Street, one of the more notable
changes made in this process. Boston is another city that changed names due to the influence of
the American Revolution. This break from traditional English naming reflected patriotism of
American values and ideals.
16

12
Stewart, Names on the Land, 75.
13
Stewart, Names on the Land, 117.
14
Stewart, Names on the Land, 117.
15
Stewart, Names on the Land, 119.
16
Stewart, Names on the Land, 124.
9

Street Patterns
As cities began to form into the metropolises we recognize today, significant thought was
given to how streets should be laid out in terms of hierarchy and circulation.
17
Thus, the names
of streets, representations of these new communities, were thoughtfully planned as well. Prior to
the formation of cities, place names were given to individual locations such as rivers, mountains
or hills, as a means of direction. The formation of master planned cities meant that maps were
drawn up and streets would need to be named all at once. In his book Names on the Land,
George Stewart claims four colonial cities as the genesis of all American cities, in terms of how
the streets were laid out and what they were called: Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York,
and Boston. As Americans explored and settled in the west, they used these four patterns, not
exclusively, as examples of how to layout a city.

17
Smith, Everett G., Jr. "Street Names in California," 78.
Figure 1.3: A plan of the city of Philadelphia, 1776. Courtesy of the Library of Congress; control number gm
71002155 (https://lccn.loc.gov/gm71002155).

10

According to Stewart, William Penn established the first naming system in America in
1682 and is credited with implementing the first the street grid system and rectangular street plan
in America.
18
Penn, a Quaker, went to Charles II to settle a claim against the Crown in exchange
for some American land; he hoped to create a religious haven in the New World for fellow
Quakers. Like other settlements, a charter was drawn and the name left blank to be settled
between the Crown and the proprietor. Working with the Secretary to Charles II, Penn proposed
‘New Wales’ however, the Secretary, a Welshman, refused. Penn then suggested Sylvania, a
Latin form meaning “forest land.” Because the King did not particularly like Quakers, as a
practical joke, he signed the charter with the name “Pennsylvania.”
19
For his city Penn, a scholar
of the classics, turned to the Greek ‘philadelpheia’, meaning brotherly love.

And with that, Philadelphia became the mother of many cities (Figure 1.4). It had a
uniquely orderly system, easy to navigate. The city was laid on a grid with four points, like the
city of Jerusalem, further paying homage to Penn’s religion. When Penn arrived to claim his new
land, many houses were already built on streets named after the most important people there.
This was not acceptable if Philadelphia was to be a Quaker settlement and so he established a
new system. In Philadelphia, streets were designated by number in one direction, while the cross

18
Stewart, Names on the Land, 105.
19
A good Quaker would not have suggested a name honoring any person. Penn must have been appalled.
Figure 1.4: Street pattern of Philadelphia. Drawn by author.
11

streets were named after trees.
20
Streets transected each other at right angles; numbered streets
in one direction and named streets for the other.
21
The eastern boundary of the settlement became
First Street. Penn’s city was the first to incorporate numbers into the names of places as a form
of organization.
22
Penn’s naming system was extremely influential in the creation of other
colonial cities and would come to influence the nation as well.
Following in the tradition of using numbers for street names, city planner Major Pierre
Charles L’Enfant laid out the new federal capital in 1791 under the direction of George
Washington. Washington D.C. (Figure 1.5), planned with long avenues intended to awe foreign
leaders and white classical architecture, a sign of democracy, became a standard for local and
state capital cities. The city is dissected into four quadrants (NW, NE, SW, SE); each section has
its own numbers. Streets running in a north-south direction are numbered First, Second, etc.
whereas those in an east-west direction are lettered A, B, C, and continued through the alphabet,

20
Smith, "Street Names in California," 78.
21
To avoid reference to people, the cross streets were named after plants and foliage found in the area.
22
Stewart, Names on the Land, 105.
Figure 1.5: Street pattern of Washington D.C.
Drawn by author.
12

except for “J” and every letter after “W.”
23
Centered around circular intersections, the third set of
names consisting of states of the Union were applied to diagonal avenues.
24
L’Enfant’s design
for Washington, D.C. was break from the traditional grid system implemented in Philadelphia.
The inspiration for City Beautiful movement, which spawned the redevelopment of many cities,
most famously Paris, the Washington, D.C. plan emphasized form over function. The City
Beautiful movement rejected the grid for its failure to provide distinctive sites for public
buildings.
25

New York’s system offered a new alternative to the orderly system Penn laid out (Figure
1.6). The New York grid was one of the first planned cities to abandon the Colonial closed grid
system, employed in many places such as Savannah, Georgia.
26
Savannah, laid out in 1733, was
organized into wards. One the east and west sides of each square, lots were set out for public

23
Much to the confusion of local college students, L’Enfant skipped “J” street reflecting the nineteenth century
controversy over John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court. Although this makes for a dramatic story,
others believe that “J” street was omitted simply because the letters I and J were often indistinguishable from each
other and it would have caused too much confusion.
24
Smith, "Street Names in California," 80.
25
Kosof, The City Shaped, 102.
26
Kostof, The City Shaped, 121.
Figure 1.6: Street pattern of New York City. Drawn by
author.
13

buildings; the north and south sides were reserved for housing.
27
The settlement was surrounded
by fences and trees that enclosed Savannah. As opposed to the bounded and definite design of
Savannah and other colonial settlements, New York’s grid was unbounded and unlimited.
A closed grid meant that the streets were bound, often by its numbering system. Once
they were laid there was little room to expand. In New York however, its open grid, not bound
by typography, allowed the city to continue to grow without interruption. If the closed grid
represented a pre-capitalist society, the open grid of New York ushered in the new era of the
Republic.
28

The New York plan was the ultimate pattern of practicality. Manhattan streets were
divided in a grid system with numbered “streets” crossing numbered “avenues.” In 1811, the
Commissioners’ Plan designed the streets above Houston Street. The grid plan that has come to
define Manhattan was designed for control and balance in an overcrowded and disorderly city.
Although the plan has been criticized for its monotony and rigidity, the visionary plan set a
precedent for use of numbered street names.
The grid was the most common pattern for planned cities in the United States.
29
It is a
simple yet effect method for city planning and has history going back to the Roman Empire. In
ancient civilizations, the grid was used a form of defense, as well as for agricultural development
and trade. A rectilinear street pattern provided a sense of order and was used by empires to
control a restless population.
30
In New York, the grid was a good solution for the equal
distribution of land, which made it easier to parcel and sell real estate. The New York grid
embodied the spirit of democracy and the American capitalist agenda.
31
Although the grid was
efficient in the distribution of land, it also led to the unequal distribution of wealth.
32
Unlike
Philadelphia, the New York grid was divided into smaller parcels which led to the disparity in
housing conditions faced in the late nineteenth century. This led to the row housing in wealthier
areas and tenement housing, with little access to light and proper sanitation. Even though the
New York grid set an example of how an open grid could transform a city, this pattern came at a
cost.

27
Kostof, The City Shaped, 96.
28
Kostof, The City Shaped, 121.
29
Kosof, The City Shaped, 95.
30
Kosof, The City Shaped, 95.
31
Kosof, The City Shaped, 121.
32
Kosof, The City Shaped, 150.
14

The fourth type of system, the furthest from the orderly one of Philadelphia, was Boston,
Massachusetts (Figure 1.7). In Boston, street names do not display any apparent system; the
streets formed more organically than other colonial cities as a series of small winding streets
interrupted by winding rivers.
33
Streets change orientation often, creating quaint and charming
streets. Some streets are named after local patriotic characters and the Revolution (For Example,
Federal Street in Downtown Boston celebrates the founding of the United States).

33
Smith, "Street Names in California," 80.
Figure 1.7: Street pattern of Boston. Drawn by
author.
15

Naming California
The Spanish were the first non-indigenous people to explore California and thus gave
names according to their own traditions and heritage. The first names recorded by the Spanish in
California were written in Spanish: El Presidio de San Francisco, La Bahía de San Diego, El Río
del Carmel, etc.
34
Spanish explorers often chose place names related to the saint linked to the
date when they arrived in a new place. First, the names were linked to mission settlements, and

34
Although the first recorded names were written in Spanish, the Native American names for places in California
that came long before the Spanish entered the land have largely been lost.
Figure 1.8: Portola’s Route from San Diego to Luis Obispo in 1769, projected on a modern map. Photo from USC
Library Special Collection/California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960; filename CHS-42269
(chs_Volume82/CHS-42269.tiff).
16

then later cities.
35
In 1769, Father Junipero Serra and Captain Gaspar de Portolá came to the bay
which Sebastián Viscaíno had called San Diego and there they founded a mission.
36
Portolá then
went north, giving places names, which for the most part did not get recorded.
37

With this act, new beginnings were made in California. However, it should be noted that
in spreading the mission practice across the state, the naming conventions differed from the
naming of missions elsewhere. With other Spanish missions such as the San Fernando de Taos in
New Mexico or San José de Tucsón in Arizona, Native American culture was incorporated into
the new holy establishment; this was not the case in California.
38

35
Stewart, Names on the Land, 28.
36
Stewart, Names on the Land, 28.
37
Many of Portolá’s men, and men of this time, were not able to read or write, as it was considered a noble right
which links to the idea that only important men, as an assertion of authority and power, were able to name places.
38
Stewart, Names on the Land, 161.
Figure 1.9: Spanish map of North America, ca. 1787. Photo from USC Library Special
Collection/California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960; filename CHS-47560
(chs_Volume118/CHS-47560.tiff).
17

While most Spanish names in the East were often replaced with more English-sounding
names, Californians celebrated this Spanish heritage with the inclusion and promotion of Spanish
naming traditions, architecture, and culture.
39
Despite the contention that this was an act of
reverse acculturation as the unsympathetic Anglo-Saxon civilization forced itself into a pre-
existing Hispanic culture, early California history is embedded into the names and architectural
legacies that exist today and continue to shape the urban landscape of the state.
Naming traditions in America continued as explorers traveled west to California; gold as
the biggest incentive. In 1849, and for many decades after, thousands of Americans were
invading Northern California and consequently took possession of the land and established their
own institutions.
40
This influx of Americans into Northern California culture did not happen as
rapidly in Southern California. Spanish continued to be used as the language of instruction in
Southern California into the 1870s. Even twenty years after the gold rush, Los Angeles remained
a small Mexican town.
41
As a result, Spanish-Mexican influences were more prominent in
Southern California than elsewhere in the state.
In 1850, with so many Americans pouring onto the land, a Constitution was adopted on
the premise that there were to be two official languages in the new state of California: English
and Spanish. At first, the Americans did not change the existing places to more English sounding
names like they had a century before in the East. With names, such as San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Monterey, or San Diego came descriptive words such as Valle or Río. These
descriptive words were too foreign for the Americans to pronounce and over time it became
acceptable to refer to such geographical terms by their English equivalents.
42
Hybrid expressions
like the San Francisco Bay or Los Angeles River became part of the regional dialect and
tradition.
City builders in California mimicked cities of the East, often transcribing names and
street patterns as an homage. For example, Long Beach developers duplicated Philadelphia with
numbered streets crossed by avenues named for trees; Sacramento, to symbolize political order,
is like Washington’s grid of numbered and alphabetically lettered streets.
43
The street patterns in
downtown San Francisco heterogeneously mimic Boston’s pattern which includes prominent

39
Wood, “Anglo Influence on Spanish Place Names in California,” 392.
40
McWilliams, Southern California An Island on the Land, 50.
41
McWilliams, Southern California An Island on the Land, 50.
42
Wood, “Anglo Influence on Spanish Place Names in California,” 394.
43
Many government centers, including Fresno and San Bernardino, also exhibit the Washington pattern.
18

people and places as names and have an irregular layout.
44
San Francisco’s street names
emphasize historic and patriotic people, along with local landmarks.
45
In California, street names
offer clues to their position and the timing of urban expansion.

Naming Los Angeles
As decreed in the Law of the Indies and the “Instruccion para La Fundaccion de Los
Angeles”, the Spanish traveled to the Southern California to establish a colony in what would
become Los Angeles. The Portolá expedition camped on the bank of the river on August 2, 1769,

44
Smith, "Street Names in California," 84.
45
Smith, "Street Names in California," 84.
Figure 1.10: Map of the street pattern and boundaries for Pueblo de Los Angeles and the caption
that appeared with the map when published, 1959. Photo from USC Library Special
Collection/California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960; filename CHS-
12932(chs_Volume35/CHS-12832.tiff).

19

and named it Nuestra Sonora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, whose feast day the explorers
celebrated the day before.
46
Until 1781, the river was called La Porciúncula.
47

On September 4, 1781, Spanish Lieutenant Josef Dario Arguello, on the orders of
Governor Felipe de Neve, established the old plaza, naming the region El Pueblo de Nuestra
Sonora, Lay Reyna de Los Angeles, after the river.
48
The Plaza was laid out with its corners
facing the four winds or cardinal points of the compass; its streets running at right angles to each
of its four sides, so as no street would be swept by the wind.
49
The city planning ordinances
dictated everything from a settlement’s site and position to the width of its streets. They also
dictated that there must be a central plaza. From this settlement, only one street name survives,
Calle Real, or Main Street.
Calle Real ran north and south through the Old Plaza’s boundaries and probably followed
the trail made by Portola’s expedition in 1769 from Mission San Gabriel and the Pueblo of Los
Angeles.
50
As the town grew, the streets strayed from its nucleus without a definite plan. If a
house was built that did not conform to the lines of the street, the street would be adjusted to
meet the house.
51
In 1835, the Pueblo of Los Angeles became a city and ceased to be a Spanish
Pueblo and by 1846, the Americans had come down from San Francisco and occupied the land.
In 1847, Los Angeles had only the rudimentary beginnings of a street grid pattern; there were
only a few well-defined streets that existed.
52

During this period, there was some confusion over the name of the town, given its
lengthy title. Commodore Robert F. Stockton called it “Ciudad de los Angelos” in 1847, while
William H. Emory, a topographical engineer sent to establish the border between America and
Mexico, referred to it as the “City of the Angels.”
53
In 1849, Lieutenant Edward Ortho Cresap
Ord surveyed the land calling the area La Ciudad de los Angeles. The present abbreviated

46
Gudde, California Place Names, 216.
47
Stewart, Names on the Land, 161; Until the late 20
th
century, it was believed that the original name for Los
Angeles was Nuestra Sonora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula. In 1980, Jack Smith wrote an article for the Los
Angeles Times, explaining that there was an early misinterpretation between the naming of the river in honor of a
religious festival and the naming the pueblo as a civil settlement. Smith, J. “L.A.: It's gotta be this or that.” Los
Angeles Times. Oct 21, 1980.
48
According to Stewart, the name was strange for a river and not suitable for a town, which is why the full title of
patroness of the church was substituted—Our Lady, Queen of the Angeles, of the Little-Portion.
49
Guinn, “The Plan for Old Los Angeles,” 41.
50
Guinn, “The Passing of Our Historic Street Names,” 59.
51
Guinn, “The Plan for Old Los Angeles,” 42.
52
Guinn, “The Passing of Our Historic Street Names,” 59.
53
Gudde, California Place Names, 216.
20

version was established when the county was organized on February 18, 1850, and the city
incorporated on April 4, 1850.
54

In 1849, the Ord Survey was the first official map of Los Angeles initiated by the
Americans. In an effort to map the city and parcel out its corporate lands to real-estate
speculators and new settlers, Ord surveyed the existing vineyards and pastures and identified
natural features. Ord was also tasked with the responsibility to carve two new grids of parcels
and streets, north and south of the plaza. Neither grid aligned with the cardinal directions like the
Spanish plaza. Streets north of the plaza were given bilingual names. Southwest of the plaza, the
surveyors drew a larger grid with a series of numbered streets.
55

54
Gudde, California Place Names, 216.
55
Guinn, “The Plan of Old Los Angeles,” 45.
Figure 1.11: Pueblo of Los Angeles, 1849. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library/Works Progress
Administration Collection; image 00067714 (http://jpg3.lapl.org/pics36/00067714.jpg).
21

Ord named the town’s streets to honor the pre-existing Hispanic culture. This act set a
long-standing tradition of reverse acculturation, in which Americans in Southern California
adopted and changed the Spanish culture to fit the needs of their own, a tradition that still exists
today. The reason that there are far more Spanish place-names in Southern California than in the
North is that while Americans were invading Northern California for gold, taking possession of
the land and created their own institutions, Southern California remained largely untouched.
56

Twenty years after the gold rush, Southern California remained essentially a Mexican town
where Spanish was the main language spoken.
57
This isolation from American influence
cemented the use of Spanish place-names in Southern California. After the Ord Survey, street
names that were once entirely Spanish, of the Castilian language, were changed to a mixture of
English and pseudo-Spanish, creating a hybrid ‘Spanglish’ that dominates the region. In 1850,
the California Constitution adopted two official languages: English and Spanish.
58

Outside of the downtown area depicted in the Ord Map, Los Angeles at the time was
largely agricultural. However, the Ord plan projected grid extensions far into what was then open
countryside; this would become the setting for Los Angeles’ early subdivisions. George Hansen,
a civil engineer, was tasked with surveying land outside of the original Ord survey that could be
sold. Not only were Hansen’s plots larger in scale from Ord’s, he also deviated from Ord’s
naming system. Hansen tried to honor the city’s dual Anglo-Hispanic heritage. Major streets

56
McWilliams, Southern California An Island on the Land, 50.
57
McWilliams, Southern California An Island on the Land, 50.
58
Wood, “Anglo Influence on Spanish Place Names in California,” 392.
Figure 1.12: Section of E.O.C. Ord’s First Map of the City of Los Angeles, August 29, 1849. Photo from USC
Library Special Collection/California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960; filename CHS-6320
(chs_Volume82/CHS-6320.tiff).
22

running east-west were named after U.S. Presidents, such Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.
The north-south streets were named after governors of Alta California, such as Alvarado and
Figueroa.
59

59
Wakida, Latitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas, 5.
Figure 1.13: Map of the city of Los Angeles, California, 1884. Courtesy of the Los
Angeles Public Library/Map Collection. MAP-00026.
23

In 1880, the land boom transformed survey lines into actual streets, growing Los Angeles
from its urban core outward with new suburbs with their own street plans. Figure 1.13 shows
1884 Los Angeles broken into sellable land. In 1895, Gaylord Wilshire, an eccentric millionaire,
carved Hansen’s thirty-five acres lots into a new residential tract and through the tract he named
the new boulevard after himself. Already by 1870, sister towns of Santa Monica and Pasadena
had been formed. In each of these cases, land grants and ranchos shaped the new street grid. In
Santa Monica, founders Robert Baker and John P. Jones, using the boundary of the Rancho, laid
out streets with numbered names that reflect the southeastern direction of the shoreline. During
this time of the land boom in Southern California, new subdivisions and suburbs were heavily
advertised in order to attract homebuyers and investments; new cities to attract tourism.
Advertising for homeownership and tourism increased the advertising of names of places as well
as streets.
Another influential street master plan, although never fully developed, was laid out in
1924 by Olmsted and Bartholomew, with consultant Charles Cheney, as Major Traffic Street
Plan (Figure 1.14). The plan proposed connecting the suburbs and downtown through a system
of wide boulevards, aligning a network of “distributor streets” around the Downtown. These
streets would have linked together outlying regions through thoroughfares.
60
The consultants
sketched wide boulevards radiating directly from Downtown to the outlying sections of the city,
a major feature of the City Beautiful plans of many cities. Although this was a traditional
approach to city design, the consultants did not have the support of local businessmen.
61

Although not adopted, the Major Traffic Street Plan was a visionary plan that foresaw the need
for wide urban roads that incorporate a variety of modes of transportation and was influential on
urban planning in the region.

60
Axelrod, Jeremiah B. C. Inventing autopia dreams and visions of the modern metropolis in jazz age Los Angeles.
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 101.
61
Axelrod, Jeremiah B. C. Inventing autopia dreams and visions of the modern metropolis in jazz age Los Angeles.
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 102.
24

Street Name/Change Policies
While developers often were at their own discretion to name the land how they saw fit, as
early as the Nineteenth Century, the city began to set regulations and parameters on how to name
streets in Los Angeles. In 1897, the Street Name Committee was formed and tasked with
approving and changing street names in the City of Los Angeles.
62
During this time, there were
many new subdivisions and suburbs in competition with one another. Street names were used to
assert the independence of new subdivisions.
63
Smaller suburbs asserted their independence to
stand out from similar suburbs. As the post-war suburban era dawned, there was an increase the
suburban development; so much so that some communities no longer named their streets after
local history or climate. The new residential land was given names intended to help market the
development. Real estate developers sold prospective buyers on the idea of the American dream,
which at the time was owning a single-family house in a nice automobile-centric community. As

62
Smith, “Street Names in California,” 86.
63
Smith, “Street Names in California,” 86.
Figure 1.14: Detail of Proposed Street Openings and Widenings of Downtown District in the Major Traffic
Street Plan, 1924. Committee on Los Angeles Plan of Major Highways of the Traffic Commission of the
City and County of Los Angeles. A Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles. By Frederick Law Olmsted,
Harland Bartholomew, and Charles Henry Cheney. Los Angeles, CA, 1924.
25

witnessed from the multiple accounts of repeated places throughout the country, coming up with
new names, without a sense of history, can be very difficult.
In 1949, Stanley L. McMichael solved this issue for new bedroom community developers
by offering a guide to naming subdivisions. In his book, Real Estate Subdivision, McMichael
provided over seven hundred hyper-sanitized options for future subdivision names, much like a
baby-naming guide.
64
Like the cookie-cutter suburban communities that were formed post-war,
McMichael’s guide is a prime example of the newer revolution of cookie-cutter place and street
names. These names offer communities the opportunity to brand themselves how they want to be
portrayed. Today real estate subdivision name generators online offer random, generic names for
new subdivisions.
65
Regardless that the origin of such names was typically the promotional
desire of the developer, the names have had a lasting value in giving inhabitants an identity of
their own in the larger urban context.
The street naming policy adopted by the County of Los Angeles in 1967 required that all
new east-west thoroughfares be called “avenues,” and all north-south thoroughfares “streets,”
and “the use of suffixes such as Drive, Place, Way, Boulevard, Street or Avenue should not be
considered as part of the basic name.”
66
As of 1999, the street name policy in the County of Los
Angeles is a thirteen-point list that explains rules to naming new streets:
1. Historic names and/or names referring to applicable geographic features shall be used wherever
practicable.
2. Names of existing streets shall be used on new streets which are continuations of, or in alignment with,
existing streets.
3. Streets shall not be named after any commercial organization or in a manner to honor any living
person.
4. The Antelope Valley Street Naming Plan (a special system of alpha/numeric street names) shall be
preserved. Deviations may be considered when there is proof the plan cannot be complied with.
5. The use of thoroughfare designations, whether prefixes or suffixes, such as drive, place, walk, via,
avenida, etc., shall not be considered as effecting a distinction in the basic name. It shall be the policy
of the Los Angeles County Street Naming Committee to use the definitions contained in the adopted
list. Definitions of Street Name Suffixes and Prefixes, as a basis of determining the appropriate
thoroughfare designation prefix or suffix, are to be applied to any street right of way to be named or
renamed.
6. East and west thoroughfares shall be called streets, and north and south thoroughfares shall be called
avenues.
7. Streets adjacent to a freeway shall be given different names on each side of such freeway.
8. The use of cardinal prefixes, such as North, South, East, and West, shall not be considered part of the
basic or base name.
9. A street name shall not contain more than 18-letter characters, including any combinations of spaces,
letters, or punctuation designations in the base portion of the name.

64
McMichael, Stanley L. Real estate subdivisions. (New York, NY: Prentice-Hall, 1949), 376-381.
65
An example of one of these sites is http://lewenberg.com/sng/index.php?number=1&submit=Generate+names.
66
Los Angeles County, “Street Name Policy,” 1967.
26

10. The use of compound names shall be discouraged.
11. Any unnamed street or portion thereof shall be named by either the Street Naming Committee for
public streets or the House Numbering Unit of Department of Public Works for private streets.
12. All street name changes of publicly owned street right of way shall be recommended for change by the
Street Naming Committee and subject to processing and approval by the Board of Supervisors.
13. Similar sounding street names are to be avoided within the same firefighting district to eliminate
identification problems when people are reporting street names under stress.
67

These rules give a clear understanding on naming new streets but do not give instruction on how
to rename a street.

67
Los Angeles County, “Street Name Policy,” 1999.
27

CHAPTER 2
Theoretical Context of Street Names

“A network of streets always serves only the purposes of communication, never of art, since it
can never be comprehended sensorily, can never be grasped as a whole except in a plan of it.”
-Camillo Sitte
68

The heritage conservation field is evolving beyond the singular definition of saving old
buildings and is moving toward focusing on creating places where people can connect to
meaningful narratives about history, culture, and identity. This chapter will set the theoretical
framework for street names as important vehicles of understanding one’s identity, culture, and
place within the urban landscape.
Breaking down the architecture of a city down to its core, streets are the foundation that
make up a city, town, or suburb. Streets, boulevards, avenues, and roads connect places in a city
to one another. Names given to these connections tells history of the people that built the
community and lived there in the past. Street names have no reason to exist and do not say
anything without people giving them meaning. Street names provide a history into the past that
permeate our daily verbal and visual vocabulary, appearing on road signs, addresses, advertising
billboards, and maps.
In Place, Race, and Story, Ned Kaufman purposes the use of the term “story site” to
describe a “place that supports the perpetuation of socially useful or meaningful narratives.”
69

“Story sites” are broadly inclusive of historical sites, cultural sites, and sites of social value.
70

Kaufman explains that story sites collect interesting stories, meaningful memories, and intense
feeling of attachment. Not only do story sites anchor individual life stories, they seek to preserve
social capital, nurture cultural capital, anchor neighborhood identity, raise historical awareness,
and foster citizenship.
71
Given this definition, historical and cultural street names should be
considered examples of “story sites” because they have contributed to the development and
history of cities similar to traditional historic resources.

68
Camillo, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 229.
69
Kaufman, Race Place, Story, 38.
70
Kaufman, Race Place, Story, 38.
71
Kaufman, Race Place, Story, 38.
28

For example, Temple Street, located in Downtown Los Angeles, (Figure 2.1), named in
1859, after John Temple, is a classic “story site” in Los Angeles.
72
In 1858, Temple erected a
small structure which was known as Temple’s Building, located east of what is now the Federal
Building.
73
It was later moved and remodeled into a block of shops, lawyers’ offices, and a
saloon (now called Temple Block) at Main and Temple Streets where Los Angeles City Hall
stands today. In 1931, there was a request to change Temple Street to Civic Center Boulevard.
The Historical Society of Southern California protested the change to the City Council, citing
that the City had the “tendency to disregard and insult the memory of the pioneering founders of
our great City.”
74
They adamantly argued against the designation of Civic Center Boulevard, to
honor civic progress, by reminding the Council that it was John Temple, one of the largest
landowners and cattle raisers in Southern California that helped to map out the beginning of the
City.
75
Although Angelenos may not necessarily know the origin of Temple Street and the
important figure behind the name, Temple Street is a significant monument to the development
of the City.
Street names, like Temple Street (Figure 2.1), have longstanding ties in the community,
creating the sense of place and historical awareness in the City. Street names are places that tell
stories that permeate our everyday lives and provide a cultural connection to our language,
memory, and environment. The impact of street names on places should be measured by the way
they affect the rhythms of everyday life. In analyzing street names as story sites, it is important
to understand that the practice of naming streets is essential to the collective memory of a city or
community because street names inherently represent how a community self-identifies, how they
developed, and/or how they navigate their space.

72
Rasmussen, Cecilia, “Los Angeles Street Names,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1989.
73
Newmark, Marco R. "Historical Profiles—I: The Life of Jonathan (John) Temple," 47.
74
“Temple Street,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1931.
75
“Temple Street,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1931.
29

As cities developed, the way places were named played an important role in the
construction of the City itself. Names such as Sepulveda, Wilshire, Crenshaw, Lankershim, and
Pico, just to name a few, penetrate the Los Angeles landscape as symbols of the City. These
names honoring developers and people of power in the City tell an important story of how the
City was developed and who developed where. If history is written by the victors, as Winston
Churchill proclaimed, then these names of these powerful people illustrate how the developer
was, and to an extent still is, a profound influence on Los Angeles. The use of commemorative
street names in Los Angeles has been instrumental in transforming the urban environment into a
political environment that has persisted for generations.

Figure 2.1: View of Temple street looking west from Temple Block, Los Angeles, ca. 1874. Photo from USC
Libraries Special Collection/California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960, filename CHS-7109
(chs_Volume39/CHS-7109.tiff).
30

Street Names as a Vehicle of Power and Authority
Street names and the renaming of streets can sometimes tell us more about the people
naming the street than the peoples and pasts being commemorated.
76
In large metropolitan cities,
unanimity does not and cannot exist, therefore, street names are often named by people in power.
As a result, street naming can be viewed as an exertion of power.
77
Street names give
communities an identity and/or an authorized version of that community’s history. This
authorized version of history is then embedded into everyday life. The everyday urbanism of
commemorative street names is instrumental in transforming the urban environment into a
political environment.
78

76
Till, Karen E. The New Berlin: memory, politics, place. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
77
Augustins, "Naming, Dedicating: Street Names and Tradition," 290.
78
Azaryahu, "The Power of Commemorative Street Names," 311.
31

Germany has a long tradition of renaming streets when a new authority comes to power.
In 1813, the Prussian government formally retained the right to change street names. From 1813-
1933 several streets were named after glorified Prussian victory. In 1933, the Nazis renamed
several streets tied to social democracy.
79
After 1945, Germans sought to de-Nazify their street
names. In May 1945, Berlin street names represented three political traditions, following three
sectors of German history: Prussian culture, pan-German, and the national socialist. After 1945,
the German Democratic Republic (GDR) systematically replaced street names representing
previous periods of German authority to reinforce their socialistic agenda.
80
Although changing
street names to authorize power of a regime did not start in the GDR, in the twentieth century,

79
Azaryahu, “Street Names and Political Identity: The Case of East Berlin,” 582.
80
Azaryahu, “Street Names and Political Identity: The Case of East Berlin,” 584.
32

former East Berlin officials used street names to politicize their socialistic agenda.
81
New street
names appeared in the Soviet sector of Berlin immediately after the Russians seized power of the
region. This tradition of renaming streets as a new authority comes to power reinforces the idea
the street names are an authorized version of history, and in Germany, street names curated the
East German identity (Figure 2.2).
The power of authority engrained into street names raises cultural and social questions of
inclusion and exclusion, the privileges of property, and the collective right to public space.
Government official’s exertion of power to change names in marginalized communities is a
practice of symbolic erasure.
82
Minority communities that want to rename streets after their

81
Azaryahu, “Names and Political Identity: the case of East Berlin, Journal of Contemporary History,” 585.
82
Reuben S. Rose-Redwood, "From number to name: symbolic capital, places of memory and the politics of street
renaming in New York City," Social & Cultural Geography 9, no. 4 (June 2008): 435.
Figure 2.2: Freienwalder Str at Genslerstr. outside of Berlin-Hohenschonhausen Memorial, former Stassi prison
showing the rebranding GDR-era street names, 2014. Photo by author.
33

cultural leaders have also faced resistance. In some communities where African-Americans have
tried to rename streets after Martin Luther King, Jr., the effort has been dismissed based off the
assumption that his historical relevance is limited to the black community.
83
However, some
people feel that Martin Luther, Jr. was important to all races and should be placed on streets
accessible and visible to everyone in the City, not just in traditionally black neighborhoods.
Figure 2.3 shows the branding of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Los Angeles, a
traditionally black community.
Street naming as a form of commemoration has the capacity to make certain visions of
the past accessible to a wide range of social groups. In contrast, restriction of commemoration
can decrease the range of accessibility to the past. This fosters debate over who bears the social
stigma of being associated with the black community through the associated of a “black” street

83
Alderman. "Street Names and the Scaling of Memory: The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.
within the African American Community," 164.
Figure 2.3: 2000 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, 1988. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public
Library/Herald-Examiner Collection, image 0050231 (http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics31/00050231.jpg).
34

name.
84
The struggle to create and control the geographic scale of recognizing King and the
achievements of all African-American engenders racial tensions in a city.
85
Renaming streets
influences the spatial organization of cities but also influences human experience and identity.
How people recognize shared and culture-specific history in their communities begs the question
of whose history is being preserved or erased. The politics of place naming will always be a
dualistic practice.

Street Names as Identity and Heritage
Street names, urban artifacts in the built environment, function as the catalyst for community
associational life. They express something about the society and are invaluable tools in any
community. Street names powerfully contribute to neighborhoods, offering a sense of identity,
an anchor in tradition, and daily ritual.
86
In communities where street names have permeated
daily vocabulary for decades, they create a publicly shared sense of neighborhood identity. Not
many people who walk down Olympic Boulevard (Figure 2.4) know that the street was renamed
from Tenth Street to Olympic Boulevard in 1929 to commemorate the Tenth Olympiad in Los
Angeles, yet it is a name familiar to most Angelenos. Since 1929, Olympic Boulevard has
become an important cultural marker in Downtown Los Angeles. People are strongly attached to
the names of where they live and these names are an integral part of the place and its traditions,
serving as a vehicle of public memory.

84
Alderman. "Street Names and the Scaling of Memory: The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.
within the African American Community," 164.
85
Alderman. "Street Names and the Scaling of Memory: The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.
within the African American Community," 164.
86
Kaufman, Race Place, Story, 47.
35

In addition to providing neighborhoods with a sense of identity, naming is a powerful tool for
promoting identification with the past and locating oneself within wider networks of memory.
87

The passing of names is an important symbol of heritage not only in terms of historical
importance but also in terms of collective memory. Street names contribute to the cultural
production of a shared past. Commemorative street naming is an important vehicle for bringing
the past into the future.
88
Street names provide consistency and understanding of one’s place in
their community, while also providing for an awareness of social reality.
89
In Los Angeles, there
are several examples of how name changes in the City have reflected a new era of the City’s
history. In 1890, High Street was renamed Ord Street to honor E.O.C. Ord, who conducted the
1849 official survey and drew the first map of Los Angeles. In 1988, Weller Street, running
diagonally from 1
st
to the corner of 2
nd
and San Pedro streets in Little Tokyo, was renamed to

87
Alderman, “Street names and the scaling of memory,” 195.
88
Alderman, “Street names and the scaling of memory,” 163.
89
Alderman, “Street names and the scaling of memory,” 163.
Figure 2.4: Los Angeles Olympic city, 1932. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library/Security Pacific
National Bank Collection; image 0098669 (http://jpg1.lapl.org/00098/00098669.jpg).

36

Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street, to honor the Japanese-American astronaut killed in the 1986
Challenger space shuttle explosion.
90
Both streets, whether recent changes or not, were renamed
to honor an important individual of that time, bridging a deeper connection with the shared past.

Street Names as Location
Cultural geographers use the term spatiality to describe the relationship between public
monuments and ritual. “Spatiality” connects where the sites are located, as a backdrop to a story,
and the spaces themselves constituting the meaning; it is both the physical place, meaning, and
site of interpretation.
91
In his book, On Collective Memory, French sociologist Maurice
Halbwachs explains public memory as relating to space as the “semiotics of space,” treating
space itself as a signifying system rather than just a material backdrop to interpretation.
92
He saw
memory as a social activity and an expression of group identity. Street names, through the
process of interpretation and community identity, become these “semiotics of space” or as
Kaufman describes, “story sites,” integral to telling the community’s story, meaning that public
history is meaningful at a certain location. In other words, urban artifacts are made up of
collective and social memory.
93
Karen Till describes collective memory as the “dynamic process
by which groups map myths…about themselves and their world onto a specific time and
place.”
94

In 1955, French Marxist theorist and writer Guy Debord coined the term psychogeography as
“the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously
organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
95
Psychogeography is, as the
name suggests, the point at which psychology and geography collide; it is the means of exploring
the behavioral impact of urban place. Psychogeography explores local history in connection to
the human relationship with the built environment. It is the study of how spaces in the City
become landmarks of a remembered geography and history. In understanding the importance of
street names to the symbiotic fabric of cities, psychogeography can be a useful tool for

90
“Los Angeles panel votes a street for astronaut,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1986.
91
Johnson, “Public Memory,” 317.
92
Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 172.
93
Rossi, The Architecture of a City, 33.
94
Till, Karen E. "Staging the past: landscape designs, cultural identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue
Wache," 251-83.
95
Guy Debord, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography," in Critical Geographies: a collection of readings,
ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada: Praxis (e)Press, 2008).
37

navigating the City. Using street names as a navigation tool to understand important and
meaningful places in the City, it can expand our understanding of memory in connection to
physical space.
Aldo Rossi, in The Architecture of the City, coined the term urban artifacts, meaning
many different physical places that make up the form of the city.
96
Urban artifacts can
summarize different places in the city but as Rossi defines, they are characterized “by their own
history and thus by their own form.”
97
Urban artifacts are made up of different components and
each component has a different value.
98
If urban artifacts, embedded with meaning, make up the
city form, they also help us to understand the city as whole. Rossi defines “locus” as a
relationship between a specific location and the artifacts within this space; it is a unique and
physical place.
99
Urban artifacts are located within this locus to build upon the city form. Street
names are located in specific communities, or loci, in the city. They are urban artifacts that give
meaning in the larger context of the city. Street names are place-based resources that are given
meaning by a community for a community and in a particular place.

Street Names as Navigation
Street names play a fundamental role in the spatial organization and symbiotic construction
of the city.
100
The practical nature of streets provide for wayfinding by distinguishing between
different streets; streets also offer direction and spatial orientation. Whether a city is constructed
on urban grid, axis system, or town square model, all urban dwellers navigate cities and towns
via streets. The practicality of street names is significant in navigating to and from and around
places. The symbolic function of the street name as a vehicle for commemoration is subordinate
to the practical function; urban dwellers, regardless of the name of the street use streets to
navigate to their homes and workplace on a daily basis.
101
Prior to official street name signs,
people navigated smaller towns through identifying how to get to important places around town;
‘turn left at the Bank, and then right when you get to the school.’ As cities grew and there was
more than one bank or school, there was a legitimate need for the names of streets for

96
Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 32.
97
Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 29.
98
Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 56.
99
Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 106.
100
Azaryahu, “Collective memory and the politics of urban space,” 311.
101
Azaryahu, “Collective memory and the politics of urban space,” 312.
38

navigational purposes.
102
Alphanumerical street names are functional and provide meaning to
communities just as much as commemorative or named streets.
In addition to the practical nature of the streets that help citizens navigate the city space,
David Appleyard’s 1969 research on landmark characteristics provided an understanding of how
people use landmarks to navigate space. In planning for Ciudad Guyana, Venezuela, Appleyard
designed a way of predicting the recall of urban buildings among residents. Appleyard
interviewed 300 residents to check “whether the traditional graphic vocabularies of land use and
site plans were relevant to inhabitants’ experience of the city.”
103
Appleyard measured the
building form by how much it was used, its visibility, and its significances to the respondents.
Among the 300 results from Venezuelan respondents, Appleyard found that they were dominated
by notably roads (sequential elements) and shapes (spatial elements).
104
Venezuelan residents
mapped roads that were fragmented, consisting of broken paths and lists of unconnected
elements. Of these remembered elements, the Venezuelan residents connected these places with
important memories, making it easier to recall. Similarly, Kevin Lynch asked residents in Los
Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City to draw cognitive maps of their respective cities to test
resident’s recall of their city. Appleyard’s experiment is similar to Lynch’s argument in that
images and memory of the city can essentially be mapped.
In Image of the City, Lynch explores how people orient themselves within the city by
examining elements of the urban environment (points, landmarks, nodes, paths, and edges) that
are remembered for their form visibility, use, and significance. Lynch asked residents of their
respective cities (Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City) to draw their city from memory. The
study not only revealed what they found most important in their daily lives, but also how they
navigate the city through remembered landmarks. Lynch’s study revealed a new understanding
of how urban design affects resident’s ability to navigate their city. Lynch showed that each
resident endowed his or her own meaning onto the city. Their memory is what allowed them to
navigate the space and determine importance. Lynch theorized that a highly imageable city will
be well-formed and distinct and will impact the lives of residents on an individual level.
Lynch’s analysis of how urban residents perceive their cities, its streets, districts, and
monuments, illustrates that urban design has an effect on memory. However, Lynch’s

102
Azaryahu, “Collective memory and the politics of urban space,” 312.
103
Appleyard, Donald. "Why buildings are known," 131.
104
Appleyard, Donald. "Why buildings are known," 131.
39

methodology is limited to the imageability of physical place. To understand the built
environment more holistically, conservation professionals cannot overlook the importance of
intangible culture and heritage.
Using a Lynchian method of analysis, in a 1984 study on cognitive mapping and elderly
adults, researchers found that the elderly relied more on certain building attributes to recall urban
landmarks than younger adults.
105
Elderly residents were asked to recall as many buildings as
they could within the downtown area of their city. In the study, elderly residents most often
remembered older places or places of significance in their lives, using these places as markers to
get to different places in the city. This study reinforces the idea that while residents share the
same space, public memory differs on an individual scale; memory also affects how residents
connect to the city. Like spaces in the city, people connect to and remember street names
differently. Recently, as part of the L.A. Metro Art Initiative, Artist Alexis Disselkoen exhibited
a compilation of every street sign in Eagle Rock. Even taken out of the context of the street,
these street signs are still able to evoke meaning well beyond their more functional purposes.

105
Evans, et all, “Cognitive Mapping and Elderly Adults: Verbal and Location Memory for Urban Landmarks,” 452.
40

Street Names as Placemaking
Places, like any kind of human experience, have a history.
106
Every place has an attached
memory that can increase meaning in the lives of their users.
107
Giving a place or a street a name
not only transforms the location into place but at the same time distinguishes the street as a well-
defined urban element.
108
Placemaking seeks to expand the sense of meaning in the built
environment; not freeze meaning in time. Placemaking can record the evolution of a place,
making it more recognizable and significant to current and future generation of users. Street

106
Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 22.
107
Harcourt, Placemakers: creating public art that tells you where you are, 5.
108
Azaryahu, “Collective Memory and the politics of urban space,” 321.
Figure 2.5: L.A. Metro Art Initiative: Eagle Rock, 2017. Photo by author.
41

names and what they represent are forms of placemaking. Street names can be tied to a certain
geographical location for hundreds of years but not with the same social and economic
demographics of people living on and around that street; they can represent many different
communities through the span of its existence. Street names as places are environments that
create meaning and can accrue value in the future. They have the capability of recalling the past
and at the same time allowing users to reinvent its meaning in the present.
Place makers is a term used to profile “objects that help to define, reveal, enrich and
reinforce, expand, or otherwise make accessible place meaning.”
109
Place makers can take the
form of sculptures and objects, reliefs and pavement inserts, fountains, benches, murals and wall
markers. According the Fleming, they “offer an anecdote to humanize the face of much new
development, and the can build a sense of future and value for neglected older environments.”
110

Though it might not be obvious, there are urban artifacts that are in our daily lives and have
meaning. Similar to street names, manhole cover art (Figure 2.6) is an example of every day
placemaking that gets overlooked in terms of preservation. Figure 2.6 shows how a utilitarian
object such as a manhole can imbue meaning in a city. Portland, Oregon also known as the City
of Roses, displays this symbol as a means of identification and pride in their city.

109
Fleming, Place Makers: Public Art That Tells You Where You Are, 7.
110
Fleming, Place Makers: Public Art That Tells You Where You Are, 7.
42

Significance of Renaming Streets
Despite the evidence that street names are vehicles of public memory and connections to
the past, there are many reasons why streets are renamed. Like the many reasons why streets are
named (e.g. for commemorative, directional, placemaking), streets are renamed to honor
someone in recent history, to reflect changing fashions, to assert political power, etc. To justify a
name change, some have argued that the original meaning of the street name, even though it may
permeate daily vocabulary, can lose its meaning over time thus becoming irrelevant in modern
times.
111
Before Figueroa Street was renamed in 1855 after Governor Jose Figueroa, who
directed the secularization of the Indian territory, it was called Calle de las Chapules, the Street
of Grasshoppers, because pedestrians used to leap out of the police’s way.
112
While one street

111
Algeo, “From Classic to Classy: Changing Fashions in Street Names,” 229.
112
Rasmussen, Cecilia, “Los Angeles Street Names: Cahuenga Boulevard Yesterday and Today,” Los Angeles
Times, July 5, 1989.
Figure 2.6: Manhole in Portland Oregon showing the symbol of the City, the rose, 2014. Photo by author.
43

commemorates an important figure in Los Angeles history and the other gives insight into daily
life of early Angelenos, both are important and should be remembered. North of Figueroa in
Hollywood is Melrose Avenue. Originally named in 1887, after Rancho owner E. A. McCarthy’s
hometown of Melrose, Massachusetts, Melrose is detached from its originally meaning, now
irrelevant, as the street is now a widely popular shopping and dining corridor catering to upper
middle-class clientele.
113

Renaming streets can be viewed as a way of creating new connections between the past
and the present. Others question if this a great enough reason to rename a street or rather an
opportunity to uncover a hidden history. Some argue people moving into a neighborhood, who
have not been their historically, reserve the right to change their adopted neighborhood’s names
to celebrate their respective culture, while others believe that this is essentially erasing the
previous community’s history. With the commemoration of one history is often a
decommemoration of another, a suppression of a previous name or history. Regardless of the
motivation to change a name, positive or negative intentions behind the action, street renaming
has a profound influence on the structure, identity, and memory of a community and their
understanding of their place within it. Street names provides a community with a sense of
identity. When a street name that has stood at the same corner for decades is replaced, there is a
possibility that that street’s story will be forgotten. Renaming streets and other public spaces has
an immediate effect on daily life, on language and on space.
114

Street names provide meaning to communities in different ways. Renaming streets have
democratic, fiscal, and cultural implications that must be considered holistically before acting.
Not all street names are invested with the same symbolic value and it is conventional that
communities would want to change some names. However, street names are considered an
integral part of the community and any change implies that new names are more legitimate than
the original name. The question begs if this is true why do streets change so often? The answer
goes back to who is leading the charge to change the street name and who is benefiting from the
renaming. These questions must be asked before renaming a street.

113
Rasmussen, Cecilia, “Los Angeles Street Names: Cahuenga Boulevard Yesterday and Today,” Los Angeles
Times, July 5, 1989.
114
Azaryahu, “Collective memory and the politics of urban space,” 318.
44

CHAPTER 3
Case Studies in Los Angeles: Brooklyn Avenue and Elysian Boulevard

“The future may learn from the past.” – John D. Rockefeller Jr.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze street name changes in Los Angeles: Brooklyn
Avenue to Cesar Chavez Avenue in Boyle Heights and Elysian Boulevard to Vin Scully Avenue
in Elysian Park/Echo Park. Both cases represent historic streets that were renamed to honor
prominent people in their respective occupations. The chapter aims to explore how although
twenty-three years apart, these cases offer a similar understanding on how the City of Los
Angeles proposes and regulates street name change. The following case studies illustrate why
Los Angeles needs a formalized street preservation program.
The City of Los Angeles has more streets than anywhere else in the United States.
115
The
City’s streets make up roughly fifteen percent of the land in Los Angeles. Repeatedly over the
years, the names of these streets have changed, reflecting the City’s transformation from a small
colonial town to the bustling metropolis it is today.

Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar Chavez Avenue

115
"A Message From Our Mayor." LA Great Streets. Accessed August 25, 2017. http://lagreatstreets.org/message-
from-mayor/
Figure 3.1: Los Angeles and Brooklyn Heights from the east, circa 1887. USC Special Collection/California
Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960/Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, 1860-
1960; filename CHS-7157 (chs_Volume39/CHS-71).
45

While many streets in Los Angeles have been renamed over the course of the City’s
history, one of the more prominent examples was when the City changed Brooklyn Avenue to
Cesar Chavez Avenue in Boyle Heights. In 1993, to honor the memory of Cesar Chavez, an
American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist, Supervisor Gloria Molina proposed
to rename 6.9 miles of roadway in Boyle Heights (parts of Brooklyn Avenue, Macy Street, and
Sunset Boulevard) to commemorate Chavez’s importance to the growing Latino population in
the greater Los Angeles region. This top-down approach sparked anger amongst the older
population in Boyle Heights who grew up with the street called Brooklyn Avenue. To understand
why people were upset one must look at the layered history of the 6.9 mile stretch that dates as
far back as 160 years.
The area that is now Boyle Heights, east of downtown Los Angeles has always been a
multi-cultural enclave for Los Angeles’ displaced communities. The 6.9 mile stretch of what is
now called Cesar Chavez Avenue (Figure 3.2) represents a layered history of Boyle Heights.
Before it was settled as Boyle Heights, it was a part of El Paredon Blano, one of early ranches in
Los Angeles. In 1855, what is now Cesar Chavez Avenue was named Macy Street, named after
Dr. Obed Macy, an early pioneer and first physician of Southern California. Dr. Obed Macy was
born on December 14, 1801 in Guilford, North Carolina.
116
Macy studied medicine at the State

116
Kimball, Bernice. Street names of Los Angeles. City of Los Angeles, Bureau of Engineering, 1988.
Figure 3.2: Map of the streets that make up East Cesar Chavez Avenue. Drawn by author.
46

Medical College of North Carolina. Upon graduation, he moved his family to Indiana to start his
own business. In 1850, the Macys moved to California, temporarily settling in El Monte. In
1852, the Macy family moved to Pueblo de Los Angeles to make their permanent home. In Los
Angeles, Obed Macy established the Bella Union hotel. In 1856, he was elected councilman to
the City. He also established the first public bath house on the corner of Mina Street (known then
as La Calle de Bano) and Cesar Chavez Avenue. Macy street was named after he died on July 9,
1857.
117

In 1876, William H. Workman decided to establish a community on the eastside, the first
planned settlement for white residents east of the LA river in the old Mission Vineyard. He
named the settlement Boyle Heights after his father-in-law, Andrew Boyle. In East Los Angeles,
Workman advocated for the building of several bridges across the river, paid for the first
horsecar line into the community, and supported efforts to bring water and gas to the residents. In
1868, a portion of Macy Street was renamed Brooklyn Avenue after the subdivision Brooklyn

117
Prudhomme, Charles, “An Early-Day Pioneer: Dr. Obed Macy,” The Grizzly Bear. August 1922.
Figure 3.3: Brooklyn Theatre in Boyle Heights showing the use of the name Brooklyn in Boyle Heights until the
early 1990s, 1987. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library/Herald-Examiner Collection; image
number 00084055 (http://jpg1.lapl.org/00084/00084055.jpg).

47

Heights.
118
Brooklyn Avenue remained an important street name for various ethnic groups until
1993 when it was changed to Cesar Chavez Avenue.
In 1993, when the street name change was proposed, advocates and community members
were conflicted for numerous reasons. Some long-time residents felt that Brooklyn Avenue, the
heart of Boyle Heights for over 160 years, defined their identity as Eastsiders. Business owners
on the Sunset Boulevard section of the rename were upset that they were losing such a
“prestigious” Los Angeles address recognized internationally. Advocates for the street name
change felt that the entire 6.9 miles dedicated to Cesar Chavez was symbolic of the growing
Latino presence in East Los Angeles and wanted to pay tribute.
Although there were many reasons why renaming Brooklyn Avenue was controversial,
the fact remains that there was little public outreach that allowed each side to discuss the subject
with elected decision-makers. Renaming the street involved approval by the County and City
Planning Department, Caltrans, the U.S. Post Office, the City of Los Angeles, the City of
Monterey Park, and the County Board of Supervisors. It ultimately required business owners and
residents to change their addresses in addition to changing hundreds of street signs. Despite
protests on steep economic impact on residents, the cost of replacing the street signs, and on
businesses, the cost of changing their mailing address, the Council voted to rename the street
(Figure 3.4).

118
Over time the name has improperly attributed to the Brooklyn, New York and the many Jewish immigrants that
moved from New York to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. The name preceded Jewish immigration in
Los Angeles by almost fifty years.
48

There was a similar proposal in Long Beach to rename Market Street as Cesar Chavez
Street. In 1993, Councilman Warren Harwood proposed renaming the Long Beach street in
memory of the late Cesar Chavez. The councilman failed to reach out to Latino community
leaders and did not gain support for the renaming. Members of the League of United Latin
American Citizens and Latino Entrepreneurial Association felt that the Latino community should
have decided when and where they wanted to honor Cesar Chavez, not having the honoring
imposed upon them.
119
Councilman Harwood set letters to residents and business owners
announcing the proposal and asking for comment. Ultimately the proposal was abandoned
because the community felt like they had been left out of the decision-making process.
There are currently twenty-six major streets across the country named after Cesar
Chavez, six of which are located in California (Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Oxnard, San Diego,
Brawley, San Francisco). In San Francisco, a nearly two-year battle led to the renaming of Army
Street in Noe Valley to Cesar Chavez Street in 1994.
120
Former Supervisor Bill Maher first
proposed that 24
th
Street in the Mission District be renamed after Chavez but after pushback
from business owners and residents, Maher suggested Army Street as an alternative. This
sparked a controversial debate, both sides enraged. Some residents were upset that the City

119
Holguin, Rick. “Plan to Name Street for Cesar Chavez Irks Latino Leaders Memorial.” Los Angeles Times. June
6, 1993.
120
Nolte, Carl. “S.F. Street Name Game Has Long History,” San Francisco Chronicle. January 25, 1995.
Figure 3.4: Brooklyn Avenue becomes Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, 1994. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles
Public Library/Shades of L.A. Collection; image number 00001218 (http://jpg1.lapl.org/00001/00001218.jpg).

49

wanted to change a 145-year-old street, others upset about the $900,000 cost to change street
signs.
121
Pro-street name change residents just wanted to honor a community hero. Although the
Board of Supervisors tried to compromise, no one option appeased both sides. Tensions spiked
when the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to rename Army Street. Anti-name changers
collected enough signatures (18,000) to bring the issue to a City-wide vote. Ultimately, in 1995,
Measure O failed. After a long-fought battle, the community’s voice was reconciled and Army
Street was renamed after Chavez.
While the pushback for the Cesar Chavez Avenue proposal in Los Angeles had more to
do with changing a historic name with little community outreach than fostering racial tensions, it
is an important subject to broach. In Los Angeles, this was not the first time a street was renamed
to honor a leader in a minority community. In 1982, Santa Barbara Avenue in South Los Angeles
was renamed to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. However, the process of renaming was
opposite from Cesar Chavez. Local Businessman Celes King III initiated renaming the street to
honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He reasoned, “there is no other street in the entire City that is
more representative of Los Angeles’ Black community. It runs from one of the area’s poorest
Black communities, through middle class Black Los Angeles, to the homes of some of the City’s
more prominent Black families.”
122
King reached out to City Councilman Robert Farrell to
acquire community support to change the street name and the name was changed in 1982.

121
Matier, Phillip. “San Francisco May Pay Dearly for Renaming Army Street.” San Francisco Chronicle. January
23, 1995.
122
Bailey, Phyllis. “MLK Boulevard Signals Tribute to Black L.A.” Los Angeles Sentinel. January 13, 1983.
50

Opposition from white community members cited that the street should not be changed
because it was named after a Catholic saint, taxing costs to the City to change street signs, and
cost to local businesses to change their addresses. Some people were worried that maps all over
the world would need to be changed before the Olympics came to Los Angeles in 1984. Some
opponents felt that by renaming the street “the area would take on an unrepresentative black
image.”
123
Shortly after the ordinance was passed there was a case filed in the Los Angeles
Supreme Court to nullify the action based on cost. The case stated that spending money on
changing street signs was an invalid approach to spending taxpayers’ money. Although the case
was dismissed, opponents appealed the decision to the California Supreme Court, which
sustained the action taken by the lower court.
124

123
Kaplan, Sam. “Residents Split on Street Name.” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1982.
124
Kelly, Robin. Interview with Celes King III. Black Leadership in Los Angeles: Celes King III. UCLA Oral
History Program. Tape Number: XV, Side Two. March 27, 1987.
Figure 3.5: Martin Luther King Boulevard, 1989. Photo
courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library/Herald-Examiner
Collection; image number 00093124
(http://jpg1.lapl.org/00093/00093124.jpg).
51

Like Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in South Los Angeles, Boyle Heights wanted to
honor an important leader in their community but they clearly wanted to do it on their own terms.
Unlike in San Francisco where the Latino population stood grounded on one side and other races
on the other, in Boyle Heights, even the newer generation felt like community identity was
linked to Brooklyn Avenue.
125
Long term residents felt that although Cesar Chavez was a great
leader, the name Brooklyn Avenue was “a park of [their] lives…it’s not an issue of being Jewish
or being Latino. It’s a matter of Brooklyn Avenue being Brooklyn Avenue.”
126
Opponents of the
plan suggested alternative streets and parks to honor Chavez but in 1994 the street was officially
dedicated on Cesar Chavez’s birthday.

125
Lacey, Marc. “The Word on the Street.” Los Angeles Sentinel. September 14, 1993.
126
Lacey, Marc. “The Word on the Street.” Los Angeles Sentinel. September 14, 1993.
Figure 3.6: Our Lady of Guadalupe Mural on Cesar Chavez Avenue showing the integration of culture in Boyle
Heights. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library/Gary Leonard Collection; photo number 0063963
(http://jpg3.lapl.org/pics28/00063963.jpg).
52

Elysian Park Avenue to Vin Scully Avenue
The renaming of Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar Chavez was not a new phenomenon in Los
Angeles City planning practices, and in fact street renaming is continuing to occur without much
public outreach. Nearly twenty-three years after Cesar Chavez was honored with his own street
in Boyle Heights, in 2016, Elysian Park Avenue, between Sunset Boulevard and Stadium Way in
Elysian Park, better known as Dodger Stadium, was formally renamed to honor Vin Scully, Hall
of Fame broadcaster for the Los Angeles baseball team. Like it’s Brooklyn Avenue counterpart,
the renaming of Elysian Park Avenue was very contentious amongst neighbors and advocates of
Elysian Park.
What is now considered Elysian Park used to be part of the original pueblo lands. The
hills had been used for a stone quarry and were barren until, in 1886, the land was donated and
the City of Los Angeles established Elysian Park with the Elysian Park Enabling Ordinance.
Elysian, the ancient Greek name for “paradise,” was one of the oldest dedicated parks in Los
Angeles. Some people suspected that then Mayor Cameron Erskin Thom, who approved the
Elysian Park enabling ordinance, created the park because he owned real estate near the land. In
Figure 3.7: Elysian Park post card of the park gardens, 1909. Photo Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public
Library/Security Pacific National Bank Collection; image number 0059605
(http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics50/00059605.jpg).
53

1887, the City planted 37,000 eucalyptus trees on the hills.
127
In 1893, the Los Angeles
Horticultural Society began the first botanical garden in Southern California near what is now
Stadium Way.
128
In 1896, the City faced economic depression, and to get people back to work,
the City hired men for a dollar a day to work on building roads and planning trees and grass in
the park.
129
These men helped lay the foundation for Elysian Park Boulevard, creating the two-
mile drive into the park.
130

Despite the potential to become of the City’s more prominent parks, Elysian Park never
did. Elysian Park remained undeveloped and unimproved for its first decade. In 1896,
Angelenos voted down a $100,000 improvement bond that would have built out more of the

127
Timothy Turner, “Our City Parks—Elysian,” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1937
128
Larry Gordon, “Elysian Park: Battered but still an Oasis,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1986.
129
Timothy Turner, “Our City Parks—Elysian,” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1937.
130
“Elysian Park Boulevard,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1897.
Figure 3.8: North Broadway entrance to Elysian Park, 1900. USC Special Collection/California
Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960/Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography
Collection; filename CHS-163 (chs_Volume24/CHS-163.tff).
54

park.
131
At the time, Griffith Park was a more popular attraction because the street car line
directly to the park made it a more convenient location for park goers. By the early twentieth
century the area was home to an active Latino population (Figure 3.9).

131
Splitter, Henry W. "Los Angeles Recreation, 1846-1900: Part II." Historical Society of Southern California
Quarterly 43, no. 4 (December 1961), 190-191.
Figure 3.9: Dominquez Family, 1951. Photo Courtesy of the Los Angeles
Public Library/Housing Authority Collection; image number 00033677
(http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics28/00033677.jpg).
55

Better known as Chavez Ravine, named after Julian Chavez who originally purchased the
land, the area has a controversial history. During the post-war housing boom, the City saw an
opportunity to expand, seeing Chavez Ravine as a prime, underutilized location. The City started
labeling the area as “blighted” and a good candidate for redevelopment. The Housing Authority
of the City of Los Angeles with a federal grant from the Housing Act of 1949, looked to Elysian
Park/Chavez Ravine area to create public housing. Although the residents protested, the City
used eminent domain to clear the hillsides and neighborhoods of Bishop, La Loma, and Palo
Verde. Although the new public housing was supposed to house the displaced residents, the
plans were never realized due to the Communist paranoia that kept public housing out of Los
Angeles. Instead of letting residents back into the area, the City sold the land to Walter O’
Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1958. Figure 3.11 shows the excavation of Chavez
Ravine to build Dodger’s Stadium which opened to the public in 1962.
The process of renaming a street in Los Angeles after Vin Scully began in 2013 when
Mayor Eric Garcetti proposed naming a street after the broadcaster. However, at the time Vin
Scully refused and the subject was not broached until the announcement of his retirement in
Figure 3.10: Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, looking north, 1961. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public
Library/Kelly-Holiday Collection of Negatives and Photographs; image number 00103213.
(http://jpg1.lapl.org/00103/00103213.jpg).

56

2015.
132
In January 2016, Councilman Gil Cedillo made the motion to begin the name change
process.
Initially, Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park and the Echo Park Improvement
Association protested the change, complaining of lack of community outreach. Community
groups were reportedly not contacted for their opinion explaining that Elysian Park does not
belong to the Dodgers. Advocates of Elysian Park felt that the people who live and enjoy the
park should have been contacted in making the decision to rename Elysian Park Avenue. The
only reported outreach was a City-issued, mailed survey that asked property owners and
residents who live on the two-block stretch of Elysian Park Avenue. The survey asked simply if
they supported the street name change. Of the sixteen people who responded twelve opposed
changing the name while four supported it.
133

While Vin Scully is an important part of the City’s modern history, many Elysian Park
residents and advocates felt like renaming the street to Vin Scully Way effectively erased a part
of the park’s history. In a letter to the Los Angeles Times’ Editor, Sallie Neubauer of the
Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park offered another location to honor Vin Scully: “Vin
Scully is a fine announcer and has left a wonderful Dodger legacy, but it would have been far
more appropriate to have given his name to something inside the grounds of Dodger
Stadium.”
134
Neaubauer reasoned that Elysian Park Avenue was the only street to cut through the
entire park prior to the construction of Dodger Stadium in 1962. Upon construction Stadium
Way and Academy Road were designated as access points into the park. Vin Scully Way was
officially dedicated on the broadcasters final opening day in 2016 (Figure 3.11).

132
Hernandez, D. “Vin Scully rejects mayor’s idea to name street after him.” Los Angeles Times. September 23,
2013.
133
“Not everyone is a fan of Vin Scully Way.” The Eastsider. April 6, 2016.
134
“Elysian Park Ave. was the wrong street to rename in honor of Vin Scully.” Los Angeles Times. April 14, 2016.
57
In each case, the street name proposal sought to change a historic street name that had
been ingrained into the community for over one hundred years (Table 3.1). Each of these historic
names was changed, except for Market Street in Long Beach, without a proposal to preserve
their stories. By having a preservation plan that engaged the community, especially those most
upset about the name change, officials could have reached more of a consensus. When
governments change street names without having a plan to recognize a historic name, these
stories are endangered of being forgotten and erased from institutional and public memory. Even
if there are social or economic shifts in a neighborhood, the foundation of a community lies in
the history of its development.
When renaming streets, it is imperative to understand the constituency affected. If there is
not an emphasis placed on outreach it begs the question who is this name change really
benefiting? The destruction of places affects people unequally, often because the power to
change places is unequally distributed.
135
This alludes back the authoritative role that cities often
play in placing names on communities as an act of power. Rather, street name changes should
come directly from a community desire and initiative if there is to be a change at all. The
government’s role in changing street names should be in the form of structuring policies that
135
Kaufman, Race Place, Story, 31.
Figure 3.11: Vin Scully Avenue Dedication, 2016. Photo courtesy of Mayor Eric
Garcetti (https://www.flickr.com/photos/99292716@N06/25940370914).
58

recognize the many layers to historic streets in the form a formalized street preservation
program.

Table 3.1: Age of Historic Street Name during Renaming Proposals
Original Street
Name
New Street Name
Location
Age of original
Street Name
Brooklyn Avenue Caesar Chavez
Avenue
Boyle Heights, Los
Angeles
125
Macy Street Caesar Chavez
Avenue
Downtown Los Angeles 138
Sunset Boulevard Caesar Chavez
Avenue
Downtown Los Angeles 105
Elysian Park Avenue Vin Scully Avenue Downtown Los Angeles 129
Santa Barbara
Avenue
Martin Luther King
Jr. Boulevard
South Los Angeles 101
Source: Kimball, Bernice. Street Names of Los Angeles. City of Los Angeles, Bureau of Engineering, 1988.
59

CHAPTER 4
Recommendations

This chapter will provide recommendations how to develop a street preservation program
in Los Angeles by exploring best practices across the country. Heritage conservation needs to
expand its definition of what should be preserved to better support the evolution of the field.
Street names represent more than just a name on a sign on a pole at the end of the street. This
chapter will address the purpose and importance of identifying and preserving street names,
separate from traditional historic resources. When it comes to protecting and conserving street
names, they present a complicated case as street names are in fact connected with an object
attached to a specific location, however, it is not the specific object that gives the street name the
meaning. Traditional intangible heritage, typically defined as non-material cultural heritage such
as rituals, dances, and skills are recorded in a database and lack the same protections and funding
as historic resources.

Existing Definitions and Guidelines for Evaluating Historic Places
In 1966, the federal government passed the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA)
which created the national Register of Historic Places. The National Register is the nation’s
inventory of recognized historic structures. In order to meet the criteria for evaluation, a district,
site, building, structure, or object, must “possess the integrity of location, design, setting,
materials, workmanship, feeling, and association…”
136
Although the NHPA allows for a broad
interpretation of what could be considered historic, it does not give direction for how to evaluate
and record intangible or non-traditional resources.
Street names do not fit into any of the categories of historic properties eligible to list on
the National Register of Historic Places. A street name is not a building, structure, object, site, or
district. The closest category would be classification as an object, since a street name is
inherently attached to a street sign or traffic light, however it is not the metal object that has
obtained the significance. In Section IV of “How to Apply the National Register Criteria for
Evaluation,” the term object is “used to distinguish from buildings and structures those
constructions that are primarily artistic in nature or are relatively small in scale and simply

136
"Section IV: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation, National Register of Historic Places
Bulletin (NRB 15)." National Parks Service.
60

constructed. Although it may be, by nature or design, movable, an object is associated with a
specific setting or environment.”
137
Examples of objects include: boundary marker, monument,
milepost, fountain, sculpture, statuary. The street sign itself is an object because it “possess[es]
association with a specific place”
138
and may qualify under an object, however the historic value
lies in the intangible history behind the name of the street sign, not in the physical object.
139

Furthermore, The National Register explicitly states, “it is not used to list intangible values,
except in so far as they are associated with or reflected by historic properties.”
140

The NPS currently has bulletins, or informational documents, on how to evaluate and
document specific property types including: archeological properties, historic aviation properties,
historic aids for navigation, historic battlefields, cemeteries and burial places, historic
landscapes, mining properties, properties that have achieved significance within the past fifty
years, post offices, rural landscapes, properties associated with significant persons, traditional
cultural properties, historic vessels and shipwrecks. Although street names are not technically a
property type, like all of these special situations, the NPS should develop a dedicated bulletin to
standardize and give direction to the evaluation and nominating of street names. When
identifying intangible elements of cultural heritage, documentation can be challenging.
141

The State of California requirements for listing a historic resource on the State Register
are similar to the national procedure. While historic resources can be significant on a local, state,
or national level, the California Register must be of statewide historical importance in order to be
nominated.
142
Also similarly to the National Register, the California State Register categorizes
historic resources into buildings, structures, objects, sites, and historic districts.
143
Examples for
objects include: sculpture, monuments, boundary markers, statuary, fountains, and maritime
resources. Object is defined as a “term is used to distinguish those constructions that are

137
"Section IV: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation, National Register of Historic Places
Bulletin (NRB 15)." National Parks Service.
138
"Section IV: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation, National Register of Historic Places
Bulletin (NRB 15)."
139
"Section IV: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation, National Register of Historic Places
Bulletin (NRB 15)." National Parks Service.
140
"Section IV: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation, National Register of Historic Places
Bulletin (NRB 15)." National Parks Service.
141
Loomis, Ormond H., coordinator. Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United
States. Washington: Library of Congress, 1983.
142
California Public Resource Code Section 5031 (a).
143
Office of Historic Preservation. "How to Nominate a Property as a California Historical Landmark or California
Point of Historical Interest,” California Office of Historic Preservation Technical Assistance Series (13),
Department of Parks and Recreation, 13.
61

primarily artistic in nature or are relatively small in scale and simply constructed, as opposed to a
building or structure. Although it may be movable by nature or design, an object is associated
with a specific setting or environment. Objects should be in a setting appropriate to their
significant historic use, role, or character. Objects relocated to a museum are not eligible for
listing.”
144
The State’s definition of an object is limiting for street names however; the State’s
definition for a “site” proves more inclusive of intangible resources with placed-based
importance.
In California, “site” is defined as, “The location of a significant event, a prehistoric or
historic occupation or activity, or a building or structure, whether standing, ruined, or vanished,
where the location itself possesses historic, cultural, or archeological value regardless of the
value of any existing building, structure, or object. A site need not be marked by physical
remains if it is the location of a prehistoric or historic event and if no buildings, structures, or
objects marked it at that time.”
145
Examples of sites include resources such as natural features,
rock shelters, battlefields, campsites, and other locations, and under this definition, it would be a
stretch to nominate a street name, the difference being that sites as currently defined are tangible
places. This does not mean the street names could not be considered. It does mean however, that
the State needs to expand the current definition of what a site can be or develop a new category
more applicable for intangible resources like street names.

Existing Preservation Resources in Los Angeles
Currently, there is no formalized program in Los Angeles that commemorates street
names as historical and cultural monuments. Figure 4.1 shows Indian Alley in Downtown Los
Angeles, a community grassroots initiative reclaiming Native history and memory in Los
Angeles. The street was unofficially named in 2011 and has since sought to recognize the
significance of the area to American Indians. The alley has become a mecca for Indian Artists
who have painted the exterior of the former United American Indian Involvement Center that

144
Office of Historic Preservation. "How to Nominate a Property as a California Historical Landmark or California
Point of Historical Interest,” California Office of Historic Preservation Technical Assistance Series (13),
Department of Parks and Recreation, 13.
145
Office of Historic Preservation. "How to Nominate a Property as a California Historical Landmark or California
Point of Historical Interest,” California Office of Historic Preservation Technical Assistance Series (13),
Department of Parks and Recreation, 13.
62

provided a safe space for American Indians for over 40 years.
146
This tactical reclaiming of
public space as a remembrance and celebration of community history should encourage a
formalized program that is legitimized by the City.
Los Angeles jurisdictions that have acted on street naming policies have either created an
honorary street name program as an addition to an existing street name or made the renaming
process more transparent. Neither of these programs treats the existing street name as a historical
or cultural monument. In Los Angeles, the only action regarding historical street names from the
government is on renaming streets. The current process for renaming a street is a ministerial
form that then gets sent to the City Council for a vote. The process itself is not easy. Petitions
signed by most landowners must be signed and processed by the Development and Mapping
Division of the Bureau of Engineering. After residents get a chance to object, a name-change
ordinance is drafted and sent to the City Council.

146
Schaefer, Samantha, “L.A.’s Winston Street has a colorful history,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2014.
Figure 4.1: Indian Alley in Downtown Los Angeles, 2015. Photo by
author.
63

Street names in Los Angeles are often changed based on a recommendation from the
government. For instance, in Boyle Heights, Supervisor Molina started the process to change
Brooklyn Avenue to Cesar Chavez Avenue. It should have come from the community, not from
a place of power. The City needs to invest in creating a street renaming program that includes the
voice of the people. If a street needs to be renamed, or a community self-identifies with a new
identity and wishes to have their street names reflect this, there should be an application that
includes a section on why the street will be renamed and the effects of the renaming. In cases
where the government chooses to rename a street to honor someone, they do not think about the
effects it will have on local businesses. When this happens, businesses must change their
addresses on their marketing materials which can be a costly thing for a small business. The
economic effects of the street name change trickle down to the citizen rather the government.
Having an application that comes from a supportive community would ensure that communities
are accurately represented how they want to be and that they are aware of the unforeseen costs.
While Los Angeles does not currently have a street preservation program, they do have a
the Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM) designation program which seeks to designate important
Figure 4.2: Murals in Indian Alley, Downtown Los Angeles, 2015. Photo by author.
64

structures and sites of cultural and historical significance. The cultural heritage ordinance,
establishing the HCM program, defines a monument as:
any site (including significant trees and other plant life located on the site), building or
structure of particular historic or cultural significance to the City of Los Angeles,
including historic structures or sites in which the broad cultural, economic or social
history of the nation, State or community is reflected or exemplified; or which is
identified with historic personages or with important events in the main currents of
national, State or local history; or which embodies the distinguishing characteristics of an
architectural type specimen, inherently valuable for a study of a period, style or method
of construction; or a notable work of a master builder, designer, or architect whose
individual genius influenced his or her age.
147

Similar to the definition of a historic resource that is eligible for the National Register, street
names do not easily fit into the category of “site, building, or structure.” The current application
for HCM nominated does include signs as an “object.”
148
However this refers to commercial
signs.

How Other Cities are Addressing the Historic Value of Street Names
Street names will have different meanings to different people at different times. The job
of the historian is to interpret history. Many cities around the country have invested in programs
that preserve street names, a majority in the form of honorary street name programs. Honorary
Street Name Programs allows cities the opportunity to commemorate individuals and groups who
have made significant contributions to the community, without causing any disruption of the
existing street grid, without change to any official maps, as would a permanent street name
change.
The City of Chicago has a long-standing honorary street name program. In 1984, the
Chicago City Council Officially adopted an ordinance for the standardization of honorary street
naming. The ordinance stated that honorary street names shall, like historical markers, be
displayed on brown street signs with the title “Honorary” and four six-point stars, which are
symbols from the Chicago municipal flag. The process to nominate an honorary street sign is
simple: someone from the community chooses to nominate a person, place or organization for an

147
City of Los Angeles, Office of Historic Resources, “Cultural Heritage Ordinance.”1962.
148
City of Los Angeles. Office of Historic Resources. Cultural Heritage Commission. Historic-Cultural Monument
Nomination Information Guide. Los Angeles, CA, 2014.
65

honorary sign; a location is chosen and a request is sent to the ward; the Alderman of the ward
accepts or denies the nomination and if accepts sends the nomination to the City Council; the
City Council receives the request and sends it to a Committee for an evaluation and
recommendation; if recommended the City Council informs the Department of Transportation to
install the new sign. As of February 2017, each ward is limited to two new honorary signs per
year.
Honorary street names do not show up on official city maps. Honorary Chicago, a
citizen-run initiative educates the public on how to nominate people for honorary street signs and
on current policies. Their website (honorarychicago.com) extensively maps all honorary street
signs in the City (approximately 2000 since 1984) and tracks new sign designations. Each new
honorary street sign gets a corresponding history that serves to educate the public on the program
and the history of the person who is being honored.

Figure 4.3: Honorary Street Name Shakespeare Garden at Sheridan Road and Garrett Place in Evanston, Illinois,
2015. Evanston Now News (http://evanstonnow.com/story/government/charles-bartling/2015-06-
15/70846/garrett-place-segment-gets-a-new-name).
66

Directly north of Chicago, the City of Evanston, Illinois has an honorary street name sign
program that allows citizens the “opportunity to honor people who have made significant
contributions to the City.” Administered by the Citizen’s Advisory Committee on Public Place
Names through the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Service, the program is
more structured than Chicago’s as it requires an Honorary Street Name Sign application to be
submitted. The criteria for designation is that the street must represent: cultural impact to the
City, historical impact to the City, Humanitarian efforts, close association with Evanston,
distinguished career brought to the City, geographical relation of the street to the honoree’s focus
of interest, and a living individual (exclusive of City Staff). Honorary street names are displayed
for a ten-year period and no more than one designation may be awarded in each ward per year.
The application is submitted to the Citizen’s Advisory Committee and approved by the Evanston
City Council. When the program launched in 1996, the signs were only supposed to remain in
place for two years, but the rule was amended in 2001 to keep the signs up for ten years.
Figure 4.4: Honorary Street Name Humphrey Bogart Place at 103st and Broadway, 2015. New
York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/nyregion/new-york-today-where-the-
streets-have-two-names.html?_r=0).
67

While Evanston found a way to honor people in the City, officials did not consider the
adverse impact of adding street signs that make wayfinding difficult. Some citizens have claimed
that the signs confuse visitors and that perhaps a better way to honor people is through park
benches or wall plaques.
149
Other people are concerned that people being recognized are already
decorated and honored for their service and this program should honor the unsung heroes of
Evanston.
The City of New York has taken similar action in creating an honorary street name
program however this is because the administrative code states that no streets which are currently
laid out upon the City map are to be formally renamed.
150
The policy goes a step further in
preserving the original name of the street but does not outwardly commemorate it as a historical
or cultural monument in the traditional conservation approach. In not doing so, the City is
making a statement that all streets are significant on an equal level—which is not necessarily a
bad thing.
While New York is unique in adopting a policy that says streets cannot be renamed, other
cities around the country have adopted policies protecting historic streets from being renamed.
The City of New Orleans takes this policy a step further by requiring an application for street
renaming that addresses historic value of the name itself. Channeled through the Council, voted
on by the City Planning Commission, the street naming policy seeks to:
1. Preserve historic and significant street names that add to the City’s cultural, architectural, and
historic ambience;
2. Maintain the continuity of street names throughout the City;
3. Improve the clarity of the City’s street names throughout the City; and
4. Provide a clear, efficient, and transparent procedure for the consideration of request to rename
streets.
151

The New Orleans’ street name policy takes a liberal approach to renaming streets. The
City recognizes there is interest in renaming streets and does not prohibit this action. The
application for renaming request must include crucial information such as a total number of lots
affected by the proposal and the reason for the change; there must be a valid reason, not just any
street name can change. Once the application is submitted Planning Commission notifies all

149
Smith, Bill, “More Honorary Street Signs Downtown.” Evanston Now, July 6, 2015.
http://evanstonnow.com/story/government/bill-smith/2015-07-06/71164/more-honorary-street-signs-downtown
150
New York City Administrative Code § 25-102.1
151
New Orleans, City Planning Commission, Street Name Change Policy, 2015.
68

affected properties, neighborhood organizations, the Department of Public Works, and the
Official Journal of the City of New Orleans and holds a public hearing within sixty days. If the
proposed street is located within a historic district, the Planning Commission forwards the
proposal to the appropriate Landmarks Commission.

The City took careful measures to ensure the quality of the streets being renamed. To
rename a street, certain criteria needs to be met: streets must be named after historically
significant actions, or a period who has made a significant positive impact on the city, state or
country and cannot honor a person who has been deceased for less than five years; the entire
street must be renamed, not just a portion, to avoid confusion; and no duplications of street
names. While the program is focused on policies that cater to renaming streets, the policy
inadvertently preserves historic street names as well by giving a forum for community outreach
and participation in the process; people have a voice to advocate for or against a street name
change in a significant way.
Figure 4.5: Plan de la Nouvelle Orleans, 1764. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map
Division, image number 2003627002 (https://lccn.loc.gov/2003627002).
69

While honorary street names are an effective way to honor an important person or
event that influenced the City, they often are not used on a daily basis, which undermines the
importance of street name. In New York, it is easier to navigate the grid by the existing
numerical system than it is to remember Humphrey Bogart Place, for example. If users of the
street aren’t referencing the honorary name does it still serve the purpose of preservation? In
most cases, these names were added to honor a certain person or event but rarely was the name
original to the street. This thesis argues that street names that have historically permeated daily
use are worth preserving and for this reason honorary street name programs are not sufficient
means of street name preservation. More cities, especially Los Angeles, need to ensure that
communities are able to adequately preserve their historic street names.

Suggestions
While Honorary Street Name programs appears to be the preferred method of street
preservation in other cities, there are more effective ways to preserve the historic and cultural
value that a street name provides a community. There are several different approaches to street
name preservation that can be explored in Los Angeles. This section outlines three different
approaches including: amending the Historic-Cultural Monument and Historic Preservation
Overlay Zone applications to include street names; building on the success of the Great Streets
Initiative to create a street preservation specific plan aimed at investing in historic streets; and
making researching historic street names more accessible.
The application process for both an HCM and an HPOZ should be rewritten to be more
inclusive of street names as historical, cultural assets to the fabric of Los Angeles. The
application should add street names as additional category for evaluation. This would require the
City developing a set of integrity standards and criteria for designation that apply specifically to
street names. Beyond making space for street name designation, the application process for
HCMs and HPOZs when referring to more traditional designations should require research on
the street names as part of a potential designation. This would greatly supplement the historical
character of the place or neighborhood but is currently not required. When street names have
been changed in a potential HPOZ it degrades the character of the original subdivision or
neighborhood. Sunset Square, a newer HPOZ located in Hollywood between Hollywood
Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, and Fairfax Avenue, is a great example of how the history of street
70

names would have better informed the decision to designate the overlay zone. Sunset Square is a
conglomerate of several subdivisions dating from the early twentieth century to 1940. Each
subdivision chose names appropriate to that subdivision. At the southeast corner of the HPOZ,
used to be a streetcar stop called Gardner Junction, which is why the streets at this corner,
leading to Sunset are diagonal, not perpendicular. Like the houses that have been altered or
demolished over time, the erasure of the streetcar system effectively altered this intersection.
When the intersection changed, so do did the names around it. Street names play an important
role in the creation of a community, and in Sunset Square they tell a story of a community
changing over time. In addition to all the other criteria considered for designation, the street
names should be considered as well.
As an alternative to lumping street names with historical architecture and neighborhoods,
Los Angeles should develop a street name preservation program that recognizes and designates
street names based on their historical and cultural significance. This program is intended to
protect the street name from being altered, but more importantly, recognize the City’s
developmental history. The HCM program currently would not meet the requirements of a street
name preservation program as the name itself is not physical and cannot be subject to design
review. Additionally, street signs themselves would not qualify as an HCM as newer models
often and easily replace them; street signs would count as a sign application, not a name.
Because street names are not physical entities, there should be a separate street preservation
program that seeks to protect the intangible cultural and historical aspects of street names in the
City.
An important question when developing a street preservation program is how would the
City identify street names for potential designation. Instead of a traditional survey instrument
that evaluates architectural merit, the City or conservationists should create a survey based on
community outreach that would focus on community stories and link them to streets; the goal
would identify which streets have cultural and historical meaning in a neighborhood.
Conservationists need to target social value and sense of place by listening to people’s stories
and analyzing them for what they reveal about the community and sense of place that has been
created.
While Los Angeles has many initiatives that support the long term economic longevity of
the of commercial corridors in the City, the Great Streets Initiative specifically focuses on
71

recognizing important boulevards and streets in the City to spawn economic development. The
Mayor’s office has identified fifteen streets in distinct neighborhoods around the City that are
important to modern Angelinos. Through the program, the City has dedicated funding sources to
help revitalize these streets. The goals of the program are to “increase economic activity,
improve access and mobility, enhance neighborhood character, greater community engagement,
improve environmental resilience, safer and more secure communities, and improve public
health.”
152

One of these recognized great streets is Cesar Chavez Avenue. At the heart of Boyle
Heights, Cesar Chavez Avenue is one of the most active commercial corridors in the City. With
the Great Streets Initiative, the City collaborated with the Bureau of Street Services and the
Department of Transportation to implement proactive infrastructure maintenance and to
strengthen linkages from the street to local transportation. The City has installed tech-savvy
street furniture and funded a community-wide pop-up event with music, art, parklets, and curb
extensions to celebrate the community of Boyle Heights. Reinvestment into this historic street is
crucial to the ongoing success and livability of Cesar Chavez Avenue and the greater Boyle
Heights community.
The Great Streets Initiative has the potential to become an innovative street preservation
program where a historic street name is nominated and preserved through an increase in
economic investment. Rather than just preserving the name, this would be an active approach to
ensuring streets stay historically and culturally relatable. The Great Streets preservation program
would not only preserve the street name but also allow the community to apply for funding to
invest back into their street. Like a preservation plan required in the HPOZ process or specific
plan, the Great Streets preservation program would require that the community develop a street
plan that would create a vision for their community.

152
"What We Do." LA Great Streets. Accessed July 11, 2017. http://lagreatstreets.org/what-we-do/.
72

Resources for Researching Street Names
There is a great resource in Los Angeles called the Kimball Guide to Street Names. In
1988, the first female draftsman in the Engineering Department of the City of Los Angeles,
Bernice Kimball, went through all the documented permits for every building and traced the
name of the street over time. Kimball documented, the original date of the street, and each date
that the street name changed. This resource is accessible at the Los Angeles Central Library
resource desk. It is an oversized book with four entries, typed with hand-written notes, on every
page, making it difficult to understand. Since it was created in the 1980s, it has not been updated
and there is only one version of the text. The Kimball Guide to Street Names needs to be updated
and digitized. Such an important resource needs to be available to the public beyond the use of
the circulation desk at the Los Angeles Central Library downtown. This digitized version would
be an important resource for historic preservation consultants working in the City of Los Angeles
to ensure that a community’s history is being preserved in whole.
Using the updated, digitized version of the Kimball Guide to Street Names, the City
should invest in a GIS program that allows people to click on a street and understand its layered
history of the name change. San Francisco has a similar system that has allowed people of all
Figure 4.6: Pages from the Kimball Guide to Street Names in Los Angeles, 2016. Photo by
author.
73

backgrounds to access street history in the City. Data and graphics guru Noah Veltman, creator
or History of San Francisco Place Names, has mapped the history behind the names of San
Francisco’s streets and landmarks. The application allows the user to engage in history by
clicking streets or landmarks on a digitized map to learn about the name of the place.
153
There
are options to browse and filter by themes such as military, politicians, authors, and to search by
a neighborhood. Clicking on a street comes up with a blurb about the person and their
accomplishments as well as a link to read more about them, usually to a wiki page. Los Angeles
would greatly benefit from an application as convenient and useful as San Francisco model is,
especially since we have access to the research in the Kimball Guidebook.
While there are several ways to preserve history through street names, there is no one
way that is right or wrong. Each community will need to decide what is most important to them.
When there is no outlet to preserve historic street names or if there is to be a street renaming, the
community should be able to reconcile that history in a different way without losing that history.
In the Brooklyn/Cesar Chavez case, it would have been beneficial for the community to honor
the Brooklyn Avenue history is some way, given that there was not an option to preserve the
historic name.

153
Veltman, Noah. "The History of San Francisco Place Names." The History of San Francisco Place Names.
Accessed July 11, 2017. http://sfstreets.noahveltman.com/.
74

CONCLUSION
Street names can be anywhere and can affect different populations, though not always at
the same time. They can affirm pride and strengthen identity within a community. By examining
our connections to street names as a cultural resource, it will help us to understand where we
come from, what we care for, and who we are. Despite the importance of street names, the
conservation field does not have adequate policies to ensure their protection. Existing policy fails
to properly address the factors that go into protecting resources with intangible cultural
significance. The conservation field must expand the definition of what is considered significant
enough for preservation protections and funding.
Criteria for determining historical significance has traditionally emphasized monuments
rather than the objects and places associated with everyday urban social life. Heritage
conservation should include place-based recognition of intangible heritage as a category eligible
for designation on local, state, and national registers. In May of 2016, the Advisory Council of
Historic Preservation released a position paper, “The National Historic Preservation Program at
50: Challenges, Opportunities, and Priorities,” for the 50
th
anniversary of the NHPA. In the
paper, the ACHP highlights continuing challenges and priorities for the future of the preservation
field. One of these priorities was “recognizing the full range of the nation’s heritage,” a policy
that calls for “the inclusion of intangible heritage…resources within the place-based context of
historic resources.”
154
While the ACHP does not specifically mention street names as an example
of intangible historic resources, it clearly sets a new precedent toward including resources not
traditional protected through historic preservation regulations. Conservation professionals need
new skills and standards in order to properly identify, document, and protect intangible heritage
and non-traditional resources.
Street name preservation can be a noteworthy tool used to protect historic and cultural
street names, one that has not been fully realized by the conservation field. In order to fully
protect street names, and other place-based, intangible resources, legislation and policy on a
national, state, and local level needs to modify existing guidelines for heritage conservation and
cultural protection to include the recognition of street names on the spectrum of cultural
resources. Although it is clear that we cannot evaluate street names the same as we can

154
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, “The National Historic Preservation Program at 50: Challenges,
Opportunities, and Priorities,” 2.
75

traditional, physical resources, some may question whether intangible resources should be
preserved at all. The intention of this thesis was to prove that street names have meaning and are
potentially worthy of conservation.
Despite the ongoing evidence that street names provide significant value to communities,
there is still more to explore about the extents and limitations of street name preservation. Should
street names become legally protected, there is still the question of what would be considered
eligible for protection and the integrity standards. Would there be an age requirement like the
National Register of Historic Places? Further analysis is needed to explore different methods and
implementation tools for future street preservation programs. There are many unanswered
questions but with regulations in place, perhaps communities like Boyle Heights or Elysian Park
could have protected the names in their communities that matter the most to them.

76

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Street names are an important aspect of any community. Street names not only provide means for direction but they also provide communities with a sense of place and understanding of their neighborhood history. Currently, there is no formal protection for safeguarding street names in Los Angeles and the process for renaming streets is ministerial, a top-down process with little community outreach required. How can planners and preservationists create tools to preserve important street names while also creating a more structured program to rename streets that allow for more community outreach and cultural awareness? ❧ This thesis explores the possibility of a formalized street name preservation program in Los Angeles using recent street name changes in the City as case studies and looking to other cities as best practices. This paper first examines the history and theory of street names giving the context as to why we should preserve them. By using examples of recent street changes in Los Angeles, this paper studies how other cities are addressing historic street name changes and how Los Angeles streets could have benefited from said programs. Planners and preservationists need to develop a comprehensive street name preservation program that not only protects historic street names from being changed but also involves diverse communities in the decision to change names by requiring community outreach. A street name preservation program may be an effective strategy in recognizing, honoring, and preserving a layered history of Los Angeles.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Emas, Melanie (author)

Core Title Preserving street names in Los Angeles, California

School School of Architecture

Degree Master of Heritage Conservation

Degree Program Heritage Conservation Planning

Publication Date 09/28/2017

Defense Date 09/28/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Brooklyn Avenue,Cesar Chavez Avenue,conservation,Elysian Park Avenue,heritage,Heritage Conservation,Historic Preservation,history of street naming,naming California,naming Los Angeles,naming North America,OAI-PMH Harvest,place name,preservation,public history,street,street name,street name change policy,street name policy,street patterns,Vin Scully Avenue

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sandmeier, Trudi (committee chair), Horak, Kathryn (committee member), Sloane, David (committee member)

Creator Email emas@usc.edu,MELANIEEMAS@GMAIL.COM

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-438802

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Legacy Identifier etd-EmasMelani-5793.pdf

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Rights Emas, Melanie

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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