A Road With No Name : Addresses: Guests and home deliveries were no-shows on this anonymous Sherman Oaks street until a resident bought a sign.

Streets in the San Fernando Valley bear the names of literary giants, legendary actors and even a famous cowboy’s horse. But No Name was good enough for one Sherman Oaks roadway.

After years of frustration because friends and delivery people could not find them, some residents along an easement off of Beverly Glen Boulevard posted a street sign dubbing the road “No Name Drive.”

The reclusive street is still hard to find, but it was nearly impossible to track down until the sign went up two years ago.

Almost everyone in the tony neighborhood has a story to tell of waiting--and waiting some more--for a taxi or deliveryman to find their house. And more than once, friends invited to dinner parties just never arrived.

“We had a tremendous amount of trouble,” one neighbor said. “Either they wouldn’t show up, or they’d call 20 minutes later from Ventura Boulevard and say, ‘We can’t find you.’ ”

No Name Drive shoots off of Beverly Glen, not far from Beverly Ridge Drive, in a steep hillside area dotted with upscale homes. The private, narrow road has not connected Beverly Glen and Mulholland since a 1969 mudslide blocked access to Mulholland, residents said.

Unsuspecting motorists often whizzed by the unmarked road as they traveled the fast-paced curlicue of Beverly Glen. The vagaries of property lines have made matters even more confusing. Some houses on No Name Drive technically have Beverly Glen addresses in Sherman Oaks while others are officially listed on Mulholland Drive in Bel Air.

Try explaining that to your local Domino’s.

“We never try to get food delivered,” said Maggie Cooper, who has lived on the street since 1976. “And I always pick up our prescriptions.”

Cooper still remembers how, in 1977, she frantically called a friend for a ride after an agonizing wait for a taxi that was supposed to take her and her husband to Los Angeles International Airport for a flight to London.

“They didn’t come and didn’t come and did not come,” she said. Repeated calls to the taxi company with new directions didn’t help. “We kept calling and they said, ‘He’s hunting for you.’ ”

When Bill Ward and Donna Yerman Ward moved into the neighborhood four years ago, they tried a number of methods to direct people to their house, describing how the street was near a 25-mile-per-hour road sign.

But to no avail.

Their decorator took drastic actions--standing on the street corner to wave down painters so they could find the Ward house. And a friend from out of town searched in vain for their Christmas party.

“He went back to the hotel and called us,” the couple said. “By then it was too late for him to come.”

The couple soon decided that a street with no name was no fun.

Bill Ward said that when the couple saw a magazine advertisement for mail-order street signs, he promptly dubbed the road No Name Drive in honor of the Big Band tune No Name Jive.

“We didn’t ponder it a lot,” said Ward.

No matter.

The green-and-white sign has since become something of a landmark for commuters along Beverly Glen. And while it has not solved all the problems, it has cut down on the number of motorists wandering the area aimlessly.

“A number of people have said it helps a lot,” Cooper said. “It’s a wonderful thing they did.”

For the Wards, however, that simple bit of signage was just the beginning.

Three plywood heifers and two small plywood sheep graze in their front yard. A yellow sign across from their house warns of the “cattle crossing.”

“Now we tell people to come up the hill at No Name Drive,” Yerman said, “and turn at the cattle-crossing sign.”

Famous Street Names

No Name Drive isn’t the only distinctive road name in the San Fernando Valley. There are plenty to choose from.

* Tennyson Place and Boswell Place in Granada Hills were named after Alfred Lord Tennyson and James Boswell, according to cartographer Linda Arnold of the Los Angeles Land Development and Mapping Division.

* Encino’s Gable Drive was named after Clark Gable while another street in the community is called Edward Everett Horton Lane, Arnold said.

* Chatsworth’s Trigger Street is named after Roy Rogers’ horse.