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Los Angeles - hidden history in the streets
What the street names mean in Los Angeles, California
La Brea
If you would like to get an idea of the enormous history that you can see in LA, start with La Brea. Nothing defines Los Angeles better than those two words - the tar. No, you don't need to pay an entrance fee to the La Brea Tar Pits museum, just go there and look at the ground. Wear some old shoes because the ground is saturated with tar. Also known as Texas Tea, black gold. Yes, that's oil. If you are wondering why oil wells aren't there in that neighborhood, instead of high-rises, go find some old pictures, they were. But, over the years the stink of oil came in conflict with the desirability of the land for real estate. Real estate won, but the oil is still there.
Owensmouth
The street right down the middle of Canoga Park is called Owensmouth. I don't know about you, but how people can use this street without wondering what it means is beyond me! To understand this, you have to untangle some "false history" of Los Angeles. The false history is just an innocent piece of fiction called "Chinatown". If you have seen this movie, and I highly recommend it, you will recall it centers on a conspiracy related to bringing water to the San Fernando valley. Remember, people were secretly buying up inexpensive land way out in the valley? The story is a fictionalized version of what happened, but it was never a conspiracy. And it happened about twenty years before the setting of Chinatown. I guess they wanted a particular look for the movie that the turn-of-the-century wouldn't provide.
Anyway, if you can imagine people living out in the San Fernando valley in the 1800s, you would be picturing some pretty thirsty people. Land was cheap, because it was dry. There was no steady supply of water. If you could add water, you would instantly have valuable land. And that is exactly what the City of Los Angeles did.
Go look it up. The City of Los Angeles built a water pipeline from the Owens valley way up in Northern California. It began in 1908 and was completed by 1913. When word of the construction got out, the little community of Canoga Park renamed itself "Owensmouth", which meant the mouth of the Owens River and started a real estate boom. As you know, the Aqueduct didn't terminate in Canoga Park, but up in Granada Hills. And Canoga Park quietly took it's name back, hoping that no one would notice. The street, however, is still there.
Here is the map from the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Los Angeles Aqueduct Power, June 30, 1910. By the way, I have this original document. If you are interested in more of the information in it, contact me.
Riverside
This one pains me a little bit, because so many people are unaware that the City of Los Angeles, like most cities in the world, is built along a river. Just because there have been tons of concrete poured, and traffic lights put up, and so on, doesn't change the fact that the LA River is right there. In other cities, such as London or Paris, you can actually see the river. But just because you can't see it in LA most of the time, doesn't mean it's not there.
Ventura
This is the road to Ventura, California, named after the Mission San Buenaventura, which is named after a 13th century Catholic Cardinal Bishop in Italy, Bonaventure. By the way, locals call it 'Ven-TUR-a", not "Ven-Chur-a". There was a song in the seventies called Ventura Highway by the band America, and that's the way they pronounced it. There is, of course, no Ventura Highway, but there is a Ventura Boulevard and a Ventura Freeway. I always thought that it was a pretty cool name.
La Cienega
Speaking a little Spanish in Los Angeles helps, but even this one can be a little tricky. I have been told it means "marsh", or something similar, but it really means "swamp". Before the early 1800s this was a continuously-wet, smelly, unpleasant area. And don't forget about the tar oozing up! Anyone who regrets how much Los Angeles has done in terms of "pouring concrete" and "destroying the original environment", doesn't know how terrible this place once was. It is now some of the most valuable real estate in the world, and deservedly so.
Mulholland
Mulholland Drive is named after William Mulholland, who was the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in the early 20th century. If you saw the movie "Chinatown", he was fictionalized as William Mulray. As an engineer, William Mulholland is remembered mostly for two things, bringing water from the Owens River to Los Angeles (see Owensmouth) and the catastrophic failure of the St. Francis dam at Ojai (Santa Clara) in 1928. To some people he is a hero, to some people, he definitely isn't. It's still the coolest road in LA, running along the top of the Santa Monica Mountains, with great views of the valley on one side and the basin on the other.