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# Taking one for the road
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/taking-one-for-the-road/
- Published: 2007-01-24T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T23:53:44.000Z
- Author: Melody Hanatani
- Tags: Education, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*City founders influenced names*

PRINCETON STREET Princeton University in New Jersey is more than 2,700 miles away. Add another 100 miles for the approximate distance to Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Tack on about 200 more for Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

Though the prestigious Ivy League schools are thousands of miles away, their presence can be felt every day in the eastern part of the city, where five streets leading to the West Los Angeles border were named after the universities attended by the children of two of Santa Monica’s earliest residents — the Bandini and Jones families.

The five school moniker-bearing streets — (from west to east) Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley — are just some of the interesting patterns of street names inside the city influenced by kinship, development, representation and, even, superstition.

“They deliberately named 13th Street, Euclid, to avoid the superstition,” said Councilman Bob Holbrook of the rumor of why the street was renamed.

The superstition is triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13.

But Louise Gabriel, president of the Santa Monica Historical Society, isn’t buying into the idea that Euclid was named so because of the superstition.

“There was a J. Euclid Miles who served with the City Council in the early years,” she said on Tuesday. “How do we know it wasn’t named after him? He donated money to build the Miles Playhouse.”

The names of the streets in Santa Monica were heavily influenced by city founders John P. Jones, the former senator from Nevada, and Robert Baker and his wife, Arcadia Bandini.

In representing the state of Nevada, Jones named what is now Wilshire Boulevard as Nevada Street, which is where his house, now the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, was located at the Ocean Avenue intersection.

He continued the trend of naming streets after states, adding Arizona, California, Washington, Colorado (originally named Railroad Street) and Oregon, which was later renamed Santa Monica Boulevard in 1913, according to Rosita Mal, a volunteer researcher at the Santa Monica Historical Society Museum.

Second Street wasn’t always referred to by the numeral, according to local historian Roger Genser, whose house is located there.

“Some earliest documents of my house say Washington Street,” he said.

Nevada Street was renamed to Wilshire Boulevard during the 1920s, when the Santa Monica portion of the street merged with the Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles,Genser said.

The street once terminated at the Old Soldier’s Home, which is now part of the Veteran’s Administration campus in West LA. Once the VA land was split to connect Nevada Street and Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica city officials decided to make it one continuous thoroughfare, Genser said.

What is now Lincoln Boulevard faced a similar fate. Eighth Street originally ran from San Vicente Boulevard in the north to Pico Boulevard in the south, until sometime between 1922 and 1925, when it joined with Lincoln Boulevard in Ocean Park.

The city’s founders also found ways to honor their loved ones by dedicating portions of the city in their name. Georgina Avenue, located north of Montana Avenue, was named after Jones’ wife, Georgina Jones. Marguerita Avenue, also located north of Montana, was named after Arcadia Bandini’s sister, Marguerita Bandini.

The Jones and Baker family business was also immortalized via street naming. Alta Avenue was named after Alta Santa Monica Company.

The newest street expected in Santa Monica will honor a famous Hollywood star — Marion Davies. An access road leading into the former Davies estate at 415 Pacific Coast Highway will be named Marion Davies Way when the public beach house is completed at the site.

The public has had a hand in renaming Santa Monica streets in the past. A few years ago, a street/ramp leading from Ocean Avenue down to PCH was renamed from Route 187 to Moomat Ahiko Way, which means “Breath of the Ocean” in the Tongva Indian native tongue. The street was named to honor the native people of Santa Monica.

In renaming the street, City Council solicited suggestions from the public. At the time, the city received more than 100 different names, said Tony Antich, the city engineer.

“Some were really funny,” Antich said. “Some people e-mailed in their own name because they wanted to \[create\] a legacy.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 24, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/012407.pdf?ref=smdp.com)