Old Maps and the Question of Faith
Ed Fuentes
[Flickr]
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Bob Pool's story on L.A. Unfolded, a newly opened exhibition of maps at the Central Library, closes with an anecdote that Downtowners may have heard before:
And what happened to the early downtown streets named Faith, Hope and Charity?
Faith became Olive Street and Charity was renamed Grand Avenue. As Los Angeles grew and thrived, people didn't want to live on faith, Creason said.
And they certainly didn't intend to live on charity.
While Charity street is certainly part of the historical record -- City Council officially renamed it on February 15, 1887 -- Faith street may just be a piece of storytelling legend.
In 1849, an army officer named Edward Ord was hired to survey the city, building a grid out of what had been open land south of 1st street and west of Main. Ord's survey listed street named in both English and Spanish.
In Ord's map, Charity street, or Calle de la Caridad, is where it should be, just east of Hope. Next over, though, is Olive street -- Calle de Accituna.
In a March 23, 1896, story in the young L.A. Times, writer J.M. Guinn took a look at the "many changes that time, flood and the Gringos have made in the olden-time streets of the city." He looks at the history of Charity street and makes his own wisecrack about Faith.
The fitness of some of Ord's names is evident, of others it is not so apparent. Why what is now Grand avenue should have been called Charity street is a matter for conjecture. The Arroyo de Los Reyes, in early times, meandered back and forth across it, rendering it impassable. Possibly Ord may have considered it an act of charity to call it a street at all. Or it may have been that he intended to
bestow on his streets the names of that trinity of virtue, Faith, Hope and Charity, but the unpromising outlook for the city to ever extend so far out, may have caused him to lose faith, so he only got in -- two of the virtues -- Hope and Charity.
So while Faith street may not have been a historic passageway, its place as the punchline of jokes has well over a decade of history.
L.A. Unfolded: Maps from the Los Angeles Public Library / October 15, 2008 - January 22, 2009 / Central Library, Getty Gallery / 630 W. 5th / (213) 228-7500
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Cleatscrea on October 16, 2008, at 05:06PM – #1
I take full responsibility for the quote but am fully aware that there never was a real Faith street in downtown or anywhere else in LA. The Cardinal virtue street story was a popular myth advanced in a Harris Newmark book. In an LA Evening Herald there was an article on January 14, 1937 that claimed that O.W.Childs having been given a large chunk of land around 8th and Fig asked his wife to name the streets to which she answered Faith, Hope and Charity, then halted at Figueroa and called it the popular name of Grasshopper (calle de las chapules). According to the tale Faith was renamed Flower and supposedly when large homes were built on Charity the nouveau riche changed it to Grand in 1886. This Charity street myth is exploded by looking at the Ord survey and other maps including the Stevenson from 1876. Grasshopper became Pearl and later joined with Figueroa giving the street 22 miles in city limits.
Juanito on October 16, 2008, at 05:21PM – #2
Grasshopper: was Grasshopper called Grasshopper - before Childs came to town?
That far out of town circa 1849, there would only have been the old road, El Camino Real. Only Calle Principal within the area of Ord's initial survey had any settlement. Otherwise, it was all open country out beyond what is now First Street. I think it would have been Ord who gave the street the name Grasshopper.
Why is there a bend in Main Street, in contrast to Ord's Survey?
Juanito on October 16, 2008, at 06:18PM – #3
Mathew Kelleher's 1875 map of the Zanja Madre, Ditches, Vineyards and Old Town shows that the original name of Flower was Calle de los Flores, that the name of Hope was Calle de los Esperanzas and the name of Grand was Calle de la Caridad.
The creek from the Arroyo is shown crossing Grand just north of Sixth. The creek was radically altered in the flood in the arroyo caused by the March 1879 collapse of the private water reservoir where Echo Park Lake is now located. That reservoir was near three times as large as what we now have. My guess is that the original topography of the area within Sixth, Grand, Fig and at least out to Ninth was greatly affected, as floodwaters fanned out all the way north from Agriculture Park to approximately First and Alameda. It was somewhat of a precedent to the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster. A reading of the present topography of the area would pose the question of how in the heck could the stream have flown horizontally or sideways around the toe of Prospect/Bunker Hill.
Hansen's 'Working Copy' of Ord's Survey held in the Solano-Reeve Collection at the Huntington Library should verify the three original street names and could also indicate what the streets were known as in the 1850s and 60s. It dates to the 1850s and is drawn on fine thick linen, the likes of which I ain't seen anywhere else.