The name derives from one of the most popular of medieval saints, the French Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, whose life, as recounted in 13th- and 14th-century manuscripts, bears resemblance to Greek legends, in a tale worthy of Shakespeare. Yet, the things that drove Gorky’s to extinction-the perception of downtown as unsafe, café patrons encountering panhandlers on their way to and from the parking lot, and homeless bundled into nearby doorways-led San Julian Street, particularly its northern half, to its rebirth as metaphor.Īnother Saint Julien in a big-city labyrinth: the Church of Saint Julien le Pauvre in Paris Hipsters of a certain age may recall the boisterous, contentious tenure of Gorky’s Café-a bohemian hangout and haven for coffee, conversation, and borscht-that, beginning in 1981, illuminated the southwest corner of San Julian and 8th Street for a decade until its agonizing demise in 1992. Elmo, San Leandro, and La Bondad-most of which vanished as streets were re-cut or renamed. San Julian Street runs north-south for a short ways-just nine blocks, from 5th to Pico-and lies a block west of San Pedro Street, at the southeastern edge of downtown.įormally established in 1883, it formed part of a loose-knit group of religious-themed streets in the area-Santa Clara, St. But perhaps none felt more profound than that of San Julian Street, a little-traveled corridor within walking distance of the city’s historic core, and within striking distance of its heart. The connections I mapped were as rich and varied as Los Angeles’ multitude of communities themselves. So, fortified by a small grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, and with my trusty spiral-bound Thomas Guide to the streets of Los Angeles at my side, I set out to see where and how the saints and streets might intersect. Rather, it was late-19th- and early-20th-century Anglo developers and city boosters who-in seeking to bestow some amber-cast, Ramona-esque Mission-style allure on otherwise anonymous stretches of pavement-gifted us these mostly Spanish titles.īut, as a believer in unintended consequences, this only heightened my curiosity. No more than a handful of paths and trails carried the names of saints before the knolls and plains that became Los Angeles were declared American soil. One thing I was fairly certain of at the outset: Nearly all our saint-streets were, counterintuitively, named neither by Spanish explorers nor Mexican settlers seeking to invoke a saint’s watchful blessings over their turf. ![]() ( Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, Our Lady of the Angels-that is, the Virgin Mary.) VOICES FROM ZOCALO’S PUBLIC SQUARE-A dozen years or so ago, I set out to find connections between the stories of 100 saints and the streets that bear their names here in Los Angeles, a city which itself is named for a saint.
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