I have been to Los Angeles twice in my lifetime, to visit family (on my mother’s side) in 1962, when I was four; I have virtually no memory of my visit but I do have photographs. The other time was when I was visiting a penpal (before PMs and email, people wrote letters) named Doré Wong over the New Year holiday, late 1990-early 1991. She had to drive me around of course, and we covered a good deal of ground. One day I borrowed a bike and went on the Pacific Ocean bike path south from Santa Monica. I kept going and going all the way down to Hermosa Beach and back, putting Doré out a bit since we were due somewhere.
However I have always been curious about LA’s street lamps, street signs and street names. I was recently sent a book by my pal, Angeleno Glen Norman, “Electric Moons,” by India Mandelkern and Tom Bertolotti, about LA street lighting. The city maintains a good deal of its old lighting while replacing more with LED lights, which are becoming universal in the USA. I remember even as a 4-year old kid in the back seat of my uncle Frank Carey’s car I was noting, in my head, the freeway lampposts as well as the single lamps hanging by wire over the street (only one or two of these can be found by 2024, if that many).
Today, though, I am noting the street names. Looking over the Thomas Guide, I was fascinated by the vast San Fernando Valley, a flat bowl (that I have never visited) where the E/W and N/S streets go on for miles and miles. There are the usual Anglo street names and Spanish names, but there are also strange names like Saticoy, Zelzah, and seemingly out of place names like Winnetka and Tampa. If you remember TV shows like “Adam-12” or “Emergency” you’ve seen these streets.
Glen Norman sent me a Facebook page called LA Street Names (from which the photo comes), which I’m sure will shine a light on some of these. “Saticoy” is the name of a major street in the San Fernando Valley and a small town and the name explanation is fascinating stuff. I’ll quote verbatim:
In 1916, a year after the City of Los Angeles annexed the San Fernando Valley, there was a need to rename Valley roadways such as 1st Street, Central Avenue, etc. because they conflicted with existing ones in L.A. Civil engineers looked to Ventura County place names for inspiration, and thus we have Saticoy, Moorpark, Oxnard, Camarillo, Nordhoff, and Strathern streets. (A street named after Leesdale, a sugar beet dump near Oxnard, later became Victory Blvd.) Ventura County’s Saticoy, an unincorporated community, was once an ancient Chumash village; modern historians like to spell it “Sa’aqtik’oy”, but since the Ventureño Chumash language had no written form, it’s effectively the same as “Saticoy”, used by Spanish settlers by 1826. Some believe the name means “sheltered from the wind”; others have translated it as “the place is here”, “I have found it”, and “the springs”. Since the Ventureño Chumash language was killed off many years ago, we’ll never really know.
Meanwhile, note the street sign: these black and white signs, known as “shotgun signs” for their shape, were once standard issue in LA but are slowly being edged out by the new design, blue with white upper and lowercase letters in Highway Gothic. However LA isn’t quite as “anal “at stamping out older signs as NYC is, so a good deal of the Shotguns have been left in place. This one can be found at Saticoy Street and Collett Avenue.
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3/3/24
9 comments
I decamped to Los Angeles a dozen years ago (very wise move, BTW) and was pleasantly surprised at how many of these old street signs exist around the city. A good 35 percent or so are the old “shotgun” type that LA stopped making by the mid-1960s. They’ve held up pretty well considering many date from the 1940s and ’50s. The sunny weather and lack of snow doesn’t hurt any.
Edward: You decamped from NYC to LA twelve years ago & call it “a very wise move”? It sounds more like an “out of the frying pan & into the fire” move. Twenty-five years ago NYC was considered the “safest large city” in the nation while the CA’s planned urban decline had begun. It saddens me to see that NYC started down the same path to self-destruction in 2014.
Los Angeles is a huge city and county. Outside of some areas like Skid Row and South Central, most of the city and a big chunk of LA County are quite nice. I live just outside the city and it’s as clean, quiet and friendly a town as you could hope for. Don’t believe everything you read on Breitbart.
Edward: As you describe it your “big chunk of LA Co”. is like NYC’s outer boroughs, especially Queens &Staten Island. However, the political establishments of both CA & NY seem to dedicate themselves to deconstructing American civilization. I’ve never regretted my decision to spend retirement in AZ. A recent example of why I feel as I do: in NYC a criminal illegal was arrested & then released from custody without having to post bail. He arrived in Maricopa Co, AZ & committed another felony. He was arrested & is now held without bail while awaiting trial. When the Soros-funded Manhattan DA contacted the Maricopa Co DA requesting the extradition of this felon the Maricopa Co DA not so politely refused the extradition request so that justice might finally be done. One more thing: No, I don’t read Breitbart, I read the NY Post.
Some believe it means “the place is here”? Who were the Chumash, Mormons? I refer, of course, to This Is The Place, a monument outside Salt Lake City.
When we moved here in 1960, we lived in Van Nuys, later moved to Canoga Park and were told when looking for a house, stay clear of Saticoy because they proposed a Freeway from Topanga to the 405 right down Satico. Never happened, niriher did the one down Topanga. City and street names are very interesting. Thanks
Of course I want to know if you’re still in touch with your pen pal.
Unfortch, not
My family moved from Northeastern Queens to the San Fernando Valley in 1980, and after having lived as a child for some years in Nassau County, I found some similarity between the two places, where suburban tract housing on former farmlands took up a large portion of both places. I don’t know why it is, but Los Angeles has never adopted the white on green upper and lower case street signs that are becoming almost universal in the US. They went from white letters on navy blue backgrounds to white letters on light blue backgrounds. Los Angeles was also one of the first cities to adopt large, almost overhead street signs at intersections. When you go out to the independent suburbs, they usually have large lighted overhead street signs with the city name on them as well as the street block numbers, a very helpful thing when driving around unfamiliar territory, but with GPS systems they are not as vital as they used to be.