The issue first came before the full council in early November 2005 (see City Council Lashes Out At Leashes) but was roundly dismissed as a dangerous precedent, too expensive and too troublesome. John Duran defined the historical dilemma for the city during a later hearing on the matter when he said, “I think the streets in the Norma Triangle: Dicks, Cynthia, Lloyd, Norma, were all named after silent screen stars of the 1920s. That’s part of the history of the area, as opposed to being about male genitalia,” he said then. “The name goes way back to the town of Sherman, and has been in place for a very long time.”
 The world famous Dicks Street sign at Doheny in West Hollywood. By Ryan Gierach. |
That statement came during a debate on creating a process by which Dicks Street residents could change the name of their street, something they wished to do because it caused them great embarrassment. That debate played out in February. See our article published on Feb. 23, 2006 Dicks Street Renaming To Be Revisited for the full story.
Michael Fisk, who leads the effort to rename the street on which he owns a house, said at that meeting that he and his neighbors endure daily, unending humiliation and stress from people’s reactions to their address. Something banal, a piece of information that we all give out with nary a thought, he asserted, traumatizes the residents on Dicks Street. “…no one can possibly imagine, before they experience it, how grinding it is to hear snide, rude remarks made daily by package deliverers or shop clerks or [nearly anyone we deal with who require an address],” he said. “It wears you down.”
Public speakers and council members, however, cautioned against tampering with something that might have been named after an important personage in the city’s beginning not realizing that the issue had already been thoroughly examined by the city’s historian, Ryan Gierach.
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One year ago West Hollywood City Council member Jeff Prang’s deputy Josh Kurpies called him asking about the history of naming of the streets in the Norma Triangle because he had written and published the city’s history in 2003, (see - West Hollywood History).
The historian informed Mr. Kurpies then that his research had shown the then-named Los Angeles-Pacific Railroad Company management, who were responsible for the roads’ construction, named those streets for either their spouses, or, more likely, the children. That would have happened in the few years after Moses Sherman bought the corner of San Vicente and Santa Monica and surroundings for that headquarters, central maintenance shop, car barn and power station in 1896 (For more on the city’s beginning’s, see History of WeHo )
 The area of West Hollywood in which Dicks Street appears. Courtesy WeHo Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. |
The generally-accepted myth that somehow the “Norma Triangle” was tied to Norma Talmadge of Silent Era Movie fame took even deeper root with Mr. Duran’s pronouncement from the dais, soon driving the debate over renaming any of the city’s streets. Jeff Prang, for example, told WeHoNews.com that the first step to take in any re-naming process would be to “assess the historic relevance or importance of the street name.”
It appeared that Dicks Street residents’ attempts at renaming their road to Dickson faced a nearly overwhelming “Hollywood Era history” argument against the change. If the street name did honor a silent movie star or starlet named Dicks, “[The name] may actually be something you’d be quite proud of,” as John Duran asserted.
Other difficulties needed facing down, of course, such as weighing the costs of the changeover in mapping, billing, bureaucracies, not to mention the public service and public safety issue that arise from such an undertaking. Mayor Abbe Land told WeHoNews.com that there were prodigious concerns to overcome not pertaining to the history. “Regardless of what we find out, we must ask the question [of the history of the street name], but there are other concerns to iron out, such as the expense and the process,” she said. She explained that was why staff was directed to compile the data they were asked for. “But if there was historic importance to the name,” she said, “it would make changing it much harder.”
 This map shows West Hollywood around 1900 after Moses Sherman had built the LAP into the largest of the Los Angeles railroads. Courtesy Arcadia Publishing, from “Images of America: West Hollywood." |
Into the scene steps Marc Wanamaker, who runs Bison Archives, a research and informational archive on the history of the motion picture industry, and who himself acts as unofficial historian for Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and West Hollywood. He has published several history books on Hollywood, his photographic collection formed the underpinnings of Mr. Gierach’s history of West Hollywood, and he has been involved for decades in researching the film industry’s history.
WeHoNews.com contacted Mr. Wanamaker to discover that he confirmed the other historian's initial findings on how the streets were named, not by finding supportive evidence for his assertions, but by refuting the “Hollywood myth” surrounding the “Norma Triangle.”
He told WeHoNews.com, “I wondered about that connection with Norma Talmadge after I first ran across a 1970s-era LA Times article that made the claim that Norma Talmadge had used the old water bottling plant on Robertson as a studio. There was no evidence presented for that claim, so I began looking for the Norma Talmadge/West Hollywood connection.”
 There are only a handful of West Hollywood Dicks Street signs that would be changed by the switchover if it were to occur. By Ryan Gierach. |
To make a long historiography story short, Mr. Wanamaker explained that he tracked Ms. Talmadge’s career closely from a couple of perspectives, film-by-film, location-by-location and residence-by-residence. “I found absolutely no connection between Norma Talmadge and West Hollywood – she never worked here or lived here. She is not the reason for the ‘Norma Triangle’s’ name,” he said. “That water bottling plant was a lot of things over the years, but never a studio, much less Norma Talmadge’s studio.”
Mr. Gierach took the research another step further, searching out mention of any performers in the motion picture industry of the time with Dicks, Phyllis, Norma, Keith, Lloyd or Cynthia as surname. That search came up empty except for Harold Lloyd, but one of six names makes not a pattern.
Which leaves, of course, the only other likely explanation, the streets were named for the children or spouses of upper-executives of the LA Pacific Railroad, or for those execs themselves (Dicks seems like a surname, while Keith or Lloyd could be either first or last names). The evidence for that assertion came from his rooting about the history of the LA Pacific Railroad in the Sherman Library and Gardens in Costa Mesa. During the period between 1896 and 1910 when Moses Sherman and his business partner Eli Clark (Clark Street?) owned the railroad and built Sherman as a company town at the main point along the transportation “wheel” the railroad formed around Los Angeles. The company needed to provide roads and housing for its workers and management at the company’s headquarters and main power station, and did so on former scrubland.
Not housing for the laborers, mind you, who were all Mexican and who virtually all lived on the rail yard itself under the stars (or whatever shelter they could find), but housing for the upper and middle management. The neighborhood directly west and north and adjacent to the rail yard became dotted with homes for the conductors, the ticket men, the engineers, accountants and freight salesmen.
 West Hollywood has many buildings in which actual historic events have been documented and confirmed, such as Marilyn Monroe’s trysts that took place in this famous WeHo apartment building. By Ryan Gierach. |
It was during this time that the roads were laid out to stretch from the rail yard to Doheny and Sunset, which at the time remained a dirt farm road, and named. Tiny homes were erected and lived in by families who had come to live and work on the fabled “Balloon Route,” a day-trip that took thousands from downtown to the sea and back again for only a dollar.
Text Addition 1:50 p.m., April 6 Dr. Peter G. Kreysa, who lives on Elevado, two blocks south of Dicks, E mailed WeHoNews.com with the following - "Our street, 'Elevado,' used to be named 'Steel St.' I think it was changed in the 40’s or 50’s." If further investigation bears that out, it would add weight to the hypothesis that the street names there were named by, or even for, railroad executives.End Added Text
So if Dicks Street is to be renamed, it will not upset the history goddesses any more than it would if we renamed Cynthia St. or Phyllis Ave. or Norma Pl. – especially if the street is renamed to honor an important personage in the city’s more recent history, say, for example, former council member Helen Albert. Whether a name change upsets the pizza or flower deliverymen is another matter entirely, but some Dicks Streeters stand willing find out.
It should beat dealing with the jokes, they figure.