The Name Game

A funny thing happened on Compton Boulevard’s way west. As it went toward the beach, it took on a new name, Marine Avenue. In recent years neighboring South Bay towns decided they too wanted the serene marine image. Once one town changed the Compton Boulevard name, it made sense to be consistent, they said. Or was it that they wanted a main street in their town to be named after anything but Compton--a predominantly black city with crime problems and a vastly under-publicized stable middle class?

Now, the city of Redondo Beach hopes to join Gardena, Hawthorne and Lawndale, and a nearby part of the county, in changing the name of Compton Boulevard to Marine Avenue. (Manhattan Beach named its segment Marine in 1908.)

Paramount a few years ago changed its segment of Compton Boulevard to another soothing moniker, Somerset. The reasons given for that name change ranged from blunt to creative. One Paramount businesswoman said the change was needed because Compton was “well-known for . . . slums and strife.” Then city officials, said, Oh no, Paramount just wanted an identity of its own, so they didn’t want the name of another city as a major thoroughfare. Oddly, though, no one was lobbying to change the name of Paramount’s Lakewood Boulevard or Downey Avenue.

Soon the purge-Compton-Boulevard trend caught on westward, as a Gardena businessman led a campaign to change the name because, he said, his 30-year-old business address on Compton Boulevard in Gardena was getting confused with a similar address in Compton. Apparently this called for an exception to the typical merchant rule that unnecessary address changes are to be avoided at all costs. After Supervisor Kenneth Hahn astutely declined to have the Gardena segment named after him, the segment was changed to the already popular Marine, in hopes of at least mentally linking Gardena to the beach cities. Again, the message was “anything but Compton.”

Redondo Beach, currently the only city west of the Harbor Freeway that has not changed the street’s name, is now considering changing its segment of Compton Boulevard to Marine. Officials there say the point is all but moot since the only other part of Compton Boulevard that is still called Compton is in that city itself, in a small unincorporated part of the county adjacent to Compton and in Bellflower, which beat back an attempt to change its segment’s name.

With the trend confirmed, even some black residents of the unincorporated area, while not planning to change the name of the boulevard, are expressing worries about their property values. Compton may be just a name, some say, but in real estate, a name can be everything.

There may be a sad Southern California novel in all of this: “Of Race and Real Estate.”