The Courtship of Eddy’s Street

So being a perpetual nut for all things Angels Flight I was bound to discover that there is indeed an Eddy Street in Los Angeles — Northridge to be specific. Actually there’s two Eddy Streets as shown below in the Google Map photo of the area around the instersection of Reseda Boulevard and Parthenia Street. All of which begged the question I posed to the knowledgeable @lastreetnames on Instagram: Any chance it’s named after @angelsflightrailway builder J.W. Eddy?

Google Maps' birdseye-view of where the Eddy Streets are in Northridge. — Click to embiggify. Can I point out what a present mess this is? One can only speculate (which I do at the end of this post) why there are two separate streets — one north of the tracks and one south of the tracks — with the same name. And if so why not identify them as Eddy Street North and Eddy Street South, the latter of which is really little more than a glorified alley. And nevermind that little leftover deadend stub on the right that’s labeled “W. Eddy Street” when it in fact lies to the east of the rest of itself.

The short answer back was: S’possible. But barring some sort of smoking memo there’s no real way of knowing with anythin approaching absolute certainty.

But there are very intriguing concidences:

1) Mr. Eddy was a veteran railway man prior to moving to Los Angeles and building the iconic funicular, thus the location of the streets immediately north and south of what was then the valley-spanning Southern Pacific Railway tracks does not seem done by chance. The immediate proximity could be seen as an homage by some admiring civil engineer.

2) The San Fernando Valley was annexed to Los Angeles in 1915, at which time according to @lastreetnames the street was called Pacific Street. Any streets in the valley that were now duplicates to existing ones in Los Angeles were ordered changed by City ordinance in 1917, at which point Pacific Street became Eddy Street. Given that Mr. Eddy died in 1916, the timing for the potentially posthumous memorial couldn’t be better ordered chronologically.

3) This last one’s a bit of a stretch requiring you to believe that the involved civil engineer(s) had an inside-joke type humor, but at the time of the name change and long before the suburban development of the valley led to Reseda and Parthenia becoming paved and major automobile thoroughfares, I figure the two now-disjointed Eddy Streets running north and south of the tracks for relatively short distances parallel to the tracks and at an angle were continguous. Funny: what also runs parallel on tracks at an angle to the north and south of each other contiguously for a short distance? Angels Flight’s two cars: Olivet and Sinai.

Are we looking at a street-level interpretation of Angels Flight honoring its creator a year after his passing? While I’m rarely not guilty of overthinking such things I’m gonna go with an enthusiastic if inconclusive yes until some buzzkilla can prove it’s a conclusive no.