The Street-Name Police: They Check Forward and Back

It was such a beautiful, lyrical name. It rolled off the tongue like poetry. It looked like literature. Was it of French origin? The name of a famous Orange County pioneer?

Laniru Street.

Then someone spelled it backward. Oops.

“Spelled backward you see why people wanted to change the name,” said Glen Worthington at Irvine City Hall.

How could such a name make its way onto an official city street sign?

“Who’d have thought? Who would sit down and spell street names backward?” Worthington said.

So, you thought it was easy to name the street where you live? Think again.

As with most human endeavors, the naming of streets begets bureaucracy. Hence, the street-naming police. Kay Eckles in the Orange County surveyor’s office is the last line of defense against inappropriately named avenues, improperly titled boulevards and any roadway monikers otherwise verboten.

Business isn’t what it used to be, of course, with the building slow-down. But an official stamp of approval is still needed when a developer submits plans for a new street to the County of Orange.

And there’s always the occasional request for a name change.

Consider the recent plight of an aggrieved bunch from the streets with no name in Aliso Viejo.

Their homes, built over the past two years, officially existed only as two nameless avenues sprouting from the 27800 block of Glenhurst. Instead of a street name of their own, the streets were given a street number on Glenhurst. So instead of an address something like 14 Main Street, they had addresses like this: 27812 Glenhurst, No. 14.

A homeowners’ group petitioned the county to christen the streets with the names of a pair of French artists.

“The . . . unit number makes them feel as if they live in an apartment instead of a home,” lobbied Kim Bryant, property manager for the Provence d’Aliso Community Assn.

After considerable paper shuffling, county officials obliged and the no-name streets became Gauguin and Matisse circles.

Walter Pinedo and some others in the tract objected, however. Perhaps sensing that a protest based solely on phonetics would not be sufficient, Pinedo also argued before county supervisors that one artist’s name was unsuitable because, after all, Gauguin “went to Tahiti to paint--and he didn’t have a life!”

The protest was in vain. But the renaming did not put the situation to rest.

“There were a few bugs that needed to be worked out,” conceded Bryant. “There was a little bit of lost mail.”

Pamela Hallan-Gibson, an Orange County historian from San Juan Capistrano, is city manager in La Palma, which has a policy of naming streets after former mayors. This practice chagrins developers, according to Hallan-Gibson.

“Instead of having these elaborate Mediterranean names, (developments) got names such as Nelson Drive and Duke Drive,” said Hallan-Gibson.

About a dozen roads carry the names of past mayors. For a while, one street even was unofficially named Rowe Lane, after previous City Manager Richard Rowe.

But Rowe may have gotten a lesson in the political pecking order following his resignation to take a job in Chino. One day he received a memento in the mail: his street name sign. La Palma city fathers had changed Rowe Lane to Nelson Lane, for former mayor Keith Nelson.

But in the street-naming game, there have been trends more pervasive than the immortalization of politicos.

Orange County’s first Golden Age of Street Renaming came in the 1930s, when roads were re-christened en masse to reflect the area’s heritage. The movement was spearheaded by Alfonso Yorba of San Juan Capistrano, who fittingly had changed his own name from Bruce Chalmers.

(This name-change champion died about a year ago in Spain, where he was going by yet another moniker, his highness Prince Bruce Conde.)

The Spanish renaming trend has snowballed over time. In South County alone there are 203 streets designated “avenidas,” 260 “calles” and 455 “villas,” according to Jim Sleeper, perhaps Orange County’s preeminent historian.

While many street names have been changed to Spanish words, occasionally a perfectly good Spanish street name has been twisted until it’s unrecognizable.

In Costa Mesa, planners applied the name of Eduardo Pollereno, one of the area’s early Spanish dons, to a street. But somewhere along the line it became Paularino Avenue, said Orange County government archivist Dennis McGuire.

According to Sleeper, great care has not always been taken with Spanish names. For example, Mariposa, a name repeated in more than one Orange County town, can mean several things in Spanish, including butterfly. But in Mexico, depending on the situation, Mariposa also means ladies of the night, Sleeper said.

Occasionally, a street name will be changed from Spanish to English, which can sometimes be an improvement.

A stretch of what is now Harbor Boulevard in Garden Grove was once Buharro, which is Spanish for buzzard.

Even the most obvious changes can take some time.

Garden Grove Boulevard was known for years as Ocean Avenue, though the ocean never could be seen or heard from anywhere on the boulevard.

“Poor old MacArthur Boulevard took about 10 years to decide whether it was ‘OR’ or ‘UR’,” Sleeper said. The street was named during World War II after Gen. Douglas MacArthur, but map-makers “didn’t get it right to begin with in 1943 . . . You see it both ways on old maps,” he said.

Misspellings are particularly irksome when they involve great people. Hence the red faces when the signs for Michelson Drive in Irvine had to be replaced for failing the spelling test.

“They had his name misspelled for years down there,” Sleeper noted. Of course, it was all the more embarrassing because Physicist Albert A. Michelson, a Nobel Prize winner, achieved fame for measuring the speed of light in experiments conducted on the Irvine Ranch.

Sleeper estimates that probably half the county’s streets have been renamed.

Sometimes there was near universal agreement.

“What’s now Poppy Street was originally Pansy Street,” pointed out Don Dobmeier, of the Orange County Historical Commission. “ Nobody wanted to live on Pansy Street.”

Other times, opinion is less than unanimous.

“Someone had come in after the events in the (Persian) Gulf and wanted to change the name (of Main Street) to Desert Storm,” Irvine’s Worthington said. “That didn’t go anywhere.”

Similarly, the movement to rename an Anaheim street to Karcher Way to commemorate local hamburger magnate Carl Karcher never really heated up.

Generally, the street-name police in city halls throughout the county can count on developers to do a lot of self-policing.

“The last thing (a developer) wants to do is sell houses on Friday the 13th Way,” Worthington said. “They want to make the names interesting for future home buyers.”

But some regulation is required to prevent duplicate names and difficult-to-pronounce names, which are nightmares to delivery people, police and firefighters.

Even with regulation, problems occur.

“Del Carlo Street and San Carlo and a Monte Carlo (provide) the opportunity . . . to be lost in the Carlos,” Worthington said.

Some changes nearly suggest themselves. Corona del Mar’s Bayside Drive, for example, once was called Electric Avenue.

“The original promoter had expected the Pacific Electric Railway to be brought down across the bay and down the coast,” Dobmeier said. “It never happened. The tracks ended in Balboa, and passenger service ended in 1950 and they tore the tracks up.”

Apparently, people develop a fondness for some street names. When the city of Orange decided to replace street signs with a more legible blue, people lined up to buy the old signs.

Sleeper said he wonders why, in Orange County, streets are named after “all these people you’ve never heard about,” but the perhaps the most common American name is missing.

“Why doesn’t someone ever come up with a Smith Street?”

Instead, “we add another Acacia Street or something like that of which there are already 16. Whose last name is Acacia?”