The Saints of Skid Row
The Stories of Saints and Streets Intersect All Over L.A., and Especially at San Julian Street
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. (Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, Our Lady of the Angels—that is, the Virgin Mary.)
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. No more than a handful …