The histories of our streets reveal aspects of the neighborhood, such as the values and aspirations of those who named it, where the money for real estate speculation came from, and how changes in culture have driven changes in street names.
Posts about Sunnyside’s streets and street-names:
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- A brief summary of the origins of Sunnyside’s street names
- Sunnyside street-name changes, new and old
- The Detroit Steps: Some historical images, and a vignette
- The Congo in Sunnyside
- Staples and Lick: Some antiracism from 1874
- Foerster: Work Hard, Die Young, and Leave a Good Name
- Acadia: The controversial history of a little street name
- Built on Beer: The Streets of Sunnyside and San Francisco Brewery Profits
- Then-and-Now photo comparisons of Monterey Boulevard
- The opening of new Edna Street
- Density on the Boulevard: The Apartment Buildings of Monterey
- Disappeared Streets of Sunnyside
- Melrose, McCarthy, and the L.A. Connection
- Read about Behrend Joost in The Sunnyside Powerhouse and the First Electric Streetcar, and in this post about his nephew CEA Foerster
Street Number Changes
On the long (east-west) blocks in Sunnyside, numbering has changed significantly over the decades, and sometimes more than once. When the blocks were first laid out in 1891, the numbering of houses was begun in the assumption that there would be numbers X00 to X50 per block (now it is X00 to X99). The builders of those few houses in the early decades appeared to have chosen their own house numbers. To clarify what happened see maps below–note numbers of highlighted houses.
The biggest overhaul of numbering happened during a massive tidying up of numbers and names that the City instituted in 1909. Here is a report on this event. [Use the left-right arrows on lower right to turn the pages of the report.]
So in our neighborhood original numbers can be markedly different from the current ones. In the post on the first provisional school I noted how the address of the cottage where the school was housed was originally 115 Flood Ave, but was then changed to 143. Without taking this phenomenon into account, and checking property maps for the actual position of lots and houses, it is quite possible to make mistakes about who lived in which house during the early years when doing research.
In addition this, there was a serious lag between changes that the City made and people actually adopting the new name or number. On the 1900 Census some people on Hearst Avenue are still using its old name, Moulton Avenue — five years after the City had changed it, while others had adopted the new name. Even though Sunnyside Avenue was changed by fiat to Monterey Blvd in 1920 by the City, various people living on that street still used the old name for years to come. (It was not a popular change amongst Sunnysiders.)