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