(Through Downey, Florence-Graham, La Mirada, Norwalk, South Gate)
Most people know Firestone Boulevard got its name in South Gate. Fewer know that La Mirada’s stretch of it had to be cut out of a working olive ranch, and that the deed still exists.
In July 1927, Firestone Tire and Rubber announced a $7 million tire factory, its first outside Akron, on 40 acres along Manchester Avenue between Alameda and Santa Fe. One month later, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors renamed the portion of Manchester east of Alameda “Firestone Boulevard.” The name rolled another mile and a half west to Central Avenue in 1929.
Russell Firestone, son of founder Harvey S. Firestone, turned the first shovel at the December 1927 groundbreaking, and the plant opened almost exactly a year later. Firestone shut it down in 1980, and the site has sat in limbo ever since, with a single original building still standing.
Out here, the job was different. In South Gate, the county was renaming a street that already existed. East of the city, Firestone Boulevard had to be created, which meant buying right of way from the ranchers whose land it would cross.
That brought the county to the McNally ranch. Andrew McNally, of Rand McNally, bought 2,300 acres here in 1888 and gave the place the name La Mirada. When the boom collapsed and his gentlemen’s estates never materialized, the land went into lemons, grapefruit, and, above all, olives, with the ranch’s olive oil shipped nationwide off the rail line. After McNally’s death, his daughter Nannie and her husband, Edwin Neff, ran the property. Their family names are still on our street signs.
The attached deed is the ranch’s contribution to the road. The trustees under Andrew McNally’s will, joined by the McNally, Clow, and Belford heirs, granted the County of Los Angeles an easement 80 feet wide, 40 feet on each side of the center line of “Firestone Boulevard (proposed),” across the west half of the west half of the northwest quarter of Section 27, Township 3 South, Range 11 West.
The county filed it as Road No. 116, Search No. 9, Parcel No. 6, First Supervisorial District, keyed to a map in Superior Court Case No. 268704. Then, one typed line at the bottom of the page: “To be known as FIRESTONE BOULEVARD.”
The best part is the reservation. The family gave up the road but kept “the right to construct a spur track across said easement from the Southern Pacific Railroad south of said easement to grantors’ factory North of said easement.”
Read that again. In 1927, the ranch was still the main event. The boulevard was the thing crossing it, and the family made sure a road named for a tire company could never cut their fruit off from the rails.
Today, Firestone Boulevard is La Mirada’s commercial spine. It began as eighty feet of olive ranch, signed away by McNally’s trustees so that a factory a dozen miles west could put its name on a road.
