Why Allesandro Street matters.
Allesandro Street is a secluded corridor where Silver Lake's hillside character meets a literary place-name, early Edendale development and the surviving remnant of a street once central to Los Angeles's first motion-picture district.
Running through Silver Lake between Echo Park and Elysian Valley, the hillside corridor follows an irregular northeast line from Glendale Boulevard toward Riverside Drive, threading beneath steep residential slopes and across terrain compressed against the eastern edge of the neighborhood. Southern blocks climb through closely spaced houses, retaining walls and narrow side streets before the roadway settles into lower ground around Whitmore Avenue and the folds of the Corralitas hills. Traveling northeast brings abrupt changes in grade and orientation as the street bends through terrain whose slopes repeatedly interrupt the regular metropolitan grid surrounding it. Residential frontage remains modest in scale, with early cottages, later hillside houses and undeveloped slopes giving successive blocks a markedly different physical profile. The result is a corridor whose steep terrain, irregular alignment, fragmented residential fabric and descent toward the Los Angeles River preserve the small-scale geography of northeastern Silver Lake.
What defines Allesandro Street.
Allesandro Street is best known for preserving the name of a much larger predecessor whose Edendale blocks became one of the principal birthplaces of the Southern California motion-picture industry. Los Angeles assigned the Allesandro name by ordinance in 1897 to a street previously called Pasadena Boulevard, drawing the name from Alessandro Assis, the Luiseño protagonist in Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona, though the street adopted the misspelled “Allesandro” form. Development expanded rapidly after the turn of the century, and by 1914 a walk between Effie and Duane streets passed Selig Polyscope, Norbig Studios, Pathé West Coast and Mack Sennett's Keystone operation within four blocks. Keystone occupied 1712 Allesandro, where Sennett produced the Keystone Cops comedies and gave Charlie Chaplin his first motion-picture employment in 1913. Norbig's nearby rental lot at 1745-1751 Allesandro accommodated an extraordinary succession of producers, including Hal Roach's Rolin Film Company, Bronx Studio, Reaguer Productions and Western Arts Studios as companies repeatedly entered and departed Edendale during the industry's formative years. Los Angeles renamed the section from Effie Street to Fargo Street as Glendale Boulevard in 1921, separating the famous studio blocks from the Allesandro name and leaving smaller surviving sections farther north to carry it into the present.
Transportation reshaped the remaining corridor through a separate sequence beginning with electric rail and ending with a freeway that inherited the street's name. Los Angeles Railway extended its local Edendale line through a private right-of-way toward the Ivanhoe hills in 1896, and Pacific Electric opened the Glendale Line through the same general district in 1906, stimulating residential subdivision across the slopes. A high timber viaduct carried the railway across Fletcher Drive from 1904; engineers replaced its central span with steel in 1927 as road improvements altered the crossing below. Rail service ended in 1955, and crews dismantled the Fletcher and Riverside viaducts in 1959 as highway construction began changing the northeastern edge of Silver Lake. State Route 2 construction subsequently occupied portions of the former rail geography, and the section paralleling Allesandro acquired the historical usage name Allesandro Freeway before the Glendale Freeway designation prevailed. Caltrans still recognizes Allesandro Freeway as a historical usage name derived directly from Allesandro Street. The surviving street carries a name that migrated from an 1897 literary commemoration into early film geography, electric-rail geography and finally the nomenclature of a major state highway.
How Allesandro Street fits.
Allesandro Street works as the anchor for an outing connecting Los Angeles water engineering, a postwar cooperative designed by one of the city's leading modernists and an immense river crossing conceived during the great municipal bridge-building campaign of the 1920s.
Begin at Silver Lake Reservoir Complex, where Los Angeles assembled one of its earliest major municipal water-storage projects after acquiring the final portions of the site in 1904. Chief Engineer William Mulholland designed the two adjoining basins, completing Ivanhoe Reservoir in 1906 and Silver Lake in 1907 with wagon-rolled earthen dams and embankments. His crews used hydraulic sluicing, a technique employing powerful water jets to excavate and move earth during dam construction. Water initially reached the complex through a supply line extending from an intake on the Los Angeles River near Griffith Park, and the larger basin received the name of Herman Silver, the first chairman of the Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners. The reservoirs subsequently gave the surrounding district the Silver Lake name, tying municipal water infrastructure directly to the geography of an entire Los Angeles neighborhood. Continue to Avenel Cooperative Housing, designed by Gregory Ain in 1947 after ten families pooled their resources to build affordable modern housing on two adjoining 60-foot-wide hillside parcels. Ain arranged ten three-bedroom residences as two rows of five, stepping the buildings backward in a sawtooth formation that gave the compact units private entrances and rear patios. Landscape architect Garrett Eckbo participated in the project, extending the indoor-outdoor principles central to Ain's postwar residential work into the shared hillside site. Original households contributed $11,000 apiece toward construction, pursuing cooperative ownership during a period when federal housing policy strongly favored individually owned detached houses. Several original residents later faced scrutiny during the anti-Communist investigations of the postwar period, adding a political dimension to a housing project already unusual for its ownership model and architectural economy. Conclude at Glendale-Hyperion Viaduct, the five-bridge complex carrying Glendale Boulevard and Hyperion Avenue between Silver Lake and Atwater Village across Riverside Drive, the Los Angeles River and the transportation infrastructure lining its banks. City engineer Merrill Butler led the design during Los Angeles's extraordinary 1920s bridge-building campaign, when voter-approved bond issues financed a generation of major river crossings. The Hyperion span opened December 19, 1928, followed by the Glendale segment in early January 1929, and the completed structure received a formal World War I memorial dedication on May 30, 1930. Opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink participated in the ceremony with the Los Angeles Firemen's Band, and Warner Bros. supplied an amplification system for the event. The progression moves from Mulholland's early municipal water engineering through Ain and Eckbo's postwar cooperative housing experiment and culminates in Butler's immense river crossing, tracing three ambitious responses to the infrastructure, housing and transportation demands that reshaped northeastern Los Angeles during the first half of the twentieth century.
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