Examining the original street layout of Santa Monica, many of the east-west streets bare the names of US states. Of the lower ten, the prominent exceptions are Broadway, Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, and Palisades Avenue. As Wilshire and Santa Monica adopted the names of the Los Angeles thoroughfares with which they later connected, they were originally called something else. I’ve just discovered that the street that is now named Santa Monica Boulevard was originally named Oregon Avenue, and Broadway was called Utah Avenue.
This is according to the LA Public Library:
http://catalog1.lapl.org/cgi-bin/cw_cgi?fullRecord+4190+968+32495+108+0
Now to determine the original name of Wilshire!
QuantumTom 