If you get lost driving around Long Beach, don’t blame the city fathers. The original, and even early subsequent layouts of the town made getting around a no-brainer, even if it was a little rough navigating the wagon-rutted roads of late-19th-century Long Beach. There was no way to get lost in the town the way it was laid out as The American Colony – a much more likably pompous name than the somewhat plain, if fetching, Long Beach that it quickly became. You had Ocean Park (now Ocean Boulevard) running along the coast as the city’s southernmost road and the street from which north-south house address numbers originated.

Moving north, you had the east-west-running streets named First Street, Second Street, Third Street – you see what the planners were doing here? – all the way to 10th Street, after which “there be dragons.” Tenth was the end of the road, roadwise.

American Colony founder William Willmore gave sort of generic names to what he planned as the major east-west streets – Pacific, American (now Long Beach Boulevard) and Atlantic avenues – and he seeded the smaller avenues with arboreal names: Magnolia was the western boundary, and interspersed eastward were (and still are) Chestnut, Cedar, Pine, Locust, Elm and Linden avenues. That would pretty much get you to the end of town, which was Alamitos Avenue, the boundary line between the two ranchos that would make up the bulk of Long Beach.

Simple as ABC

So, there you go. What could go wrong?

And things were just as simple once you crossed Alamitos and ventured into the Alamitos Beach Townsite, where organizers had thoughtfully laid out the streets in a nice, alphabetical section. As long as you knew your ABCs, you didn’t need a GPS:

Bonito, Cerritos, Descanso, Esperanza, Falcon, Gaviota, Hermosa, Independencia, Junipero, Kalamazoo, Lindero, Modjeska, Naranja, Ojai, Paloma, Quito, Redondo, Sobrante and Termino, which was the eastern boundary of Alamitos Beach – and all was well in the world.

But the Alamitos Beachers didn’t see the day when new streets would be added in between the alphabetical streets, throwing everything out of whack, and many of the street names were changed for no good reason that we can see from this remove.

Some changes were fairly nonsensical. Termino, for instance, became Euclid, and a new Termino was added three blocks to the east as the township expanded – ostensibly because Termino was the terminus of the town, though it hasn’t retained that position in the intervening years. Naranja, which is Spanish for orange, became Temple, after one of the early landowners of the area that would encompass Long Beach. Descanso, meanwhile, became Orange Avenue.

Other early changes of the alphabetical streets: The glorious Independencia became Cherry, Sobrante became Loma, Modjeska turned into Molino, Kawahea became Kennebec, Ojai was changed to Orizaba and Quito became Coronado. It was a good time to be a street-sign salesman.

A real test

In this era, two of Long Beach’s most problematic street names came into being with Ximeno and Junipero avenues.

Junipero’s namesake was the Johnny Appleseed of missions, Father Junipero Serra. Therefore, ideally, it should be pronounced “Yoo-nee-PER-oh,” with the absence of any stress indicators. Ximeno is the masculine from of Ximena, who was the wife of Spanish nobleman El Cid. There shouldn’t be a street named Ximeno in the first place, but, given that there is, the Spanish pronunciation would be, generally speaking “Hee-MAY-no.”

That said, they’re not typically pronounced that way. In the grand tradition of U.S. citizens pronouncing things the way they want to pronounce them (see: San PEE-dro), the pronunciation of Junipero has fairly fully fallen into Yuan-IH-pero, despite the clear absence of the letter A. And Ximeno is almost unanimously pronounce ex-IM-eno. One pronounces them correctly, in the Spanish manner, at the peril of being labeled some kind of fancy-pants snob.

Eastward again, Belmont Shore’s developers came up with a raft of names that bring to mind places we don’t want to live. Trying to establish itself as an oasis of sort, a place for inlanders to come and cool off, perchance to purchase one of the Shore’s seaside cottages in the era long before McMansions, several of the streets were named for towns whose residents might most appreciate the cooler and breezier climate: Corona, Covina, Claremont, Glendora, Covina and Santa Ana.

Then came the boomiest of all expansions, as the city pushed eastward again, and way up to the north with the post-war building explosion that added the sugarbeet and bean fields to the city limits with the 1950s development of the Plaza and Los Altos areas. Once again, builders took a stab at alphabetizing north-south avenues for directional cues, even though the building of normal grids had fallen from favor and twisty and winding roads sometimes crossed one another or vaulted over others. Still, at least they tried, with an alphabet that started with H and ran through P. The streets are still named the same today, with no theme whatever other than the alphabet: Hackett, Iroquois, Josie, Knoxville, Ladoga, Monogram, Nipomo, Ostrom, Petaluma.

There were seemingly more streets than names for them in those building boom years from 1950-60. Developer Lloyd Whaley named Britton Drive as a reward/payment to then-popular actress Barbara Britton’s visit to the development as a pitch-person for the new, modern homes in the neighborhood behind the Los Altos Shopping Center.

Pine branches out

For general navigating purposes, Pine Avenue continues to divide the town east and west until it gets all tangled up in the Los Cerritos area at Country Club Drive, after which Long Beach Boulevard is where the 100 East and 100 West blocks originate. Ocean Boulevard divides the city, however inequitably, north and south.

As you walk, bike, bus or drive inland, the numbered streets will sort of help you out, but they grow sort of hazy past the original northern boundary of 10th Street.

Eleventh Street plays a pretty minor role, and none of the other double-digit numbered streets manage to make it from one end of town to the other. The major east-west streets have all lost their numbered designations, if they ever had them. Thirteenth Street has never existed, for weak but obvious reasons. It goes by the name of Anaheim Street. Pacific Coast Highway would be 18th Street, Hill Street would be 22nd; Burnett would be 24th, Willow would be 26th, Spring 30th, Wardlow Road is mostly 34th; Carson is 41st; Del Amo is 50th; Artesia is 66th; and you hit the end of the numbered streets at 72nd. (Coincidentally, the end of Long Beach’s tony Peninsula is 72nd Place.)

As nature intended, even-numbered addresses are on the south or east sides of the street.

Finally, for those who want to figure out distances without stooping to Google Maps, the main avenues – running north-south – are one-quarter mile apart, the major streets – running east-west – are about one-half mile apart.