Walk Hudson Avenue today and nothing immediately announces that the street carries the name of one of early Hollywood’s pioneer families. Like so many Los Angeles streets, it reads as ordinary—quiet blocks, apartment houses, the accumulated layers of a city that grew faster than memory could keep pace. Yet Hudson Avenue is a fragment of an earlier Hollywood, when land was measured in acres, streets were still negotiable ideas on paper, and family tragedy, ambition, and real estate speculation converged to shape the map.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
The street is named after Thomas Hudson, who was born in Ohio in 1842 and who, before coming to Hollywood, had what would be considered an unlikely journey. In the 1870s Hudson ran a saloon in St. Joseph, Missouri. It was there that he faced a great tragedy. In about a two-year period in the late 1870s, Hudson lost his nine-year-old son, Charles, his first wife, Mary, and an infant daughter, Emma. His second wife, Lavenia Sayle, was born in 1855. The two were married in 1882 and she would be his wife until his death. She would play a quiet, but important, role in the family's journey to the West.
By the late 1880s, the Hudsons joined the growing tide of Midwesterners drawn to Southern California by climate, opportunity, and the promise of land. Five years after their marriage, Thomas and Lavenia relocated to Los Angeles with their surviving children, including daughter Blanche and son Thomas E. It was in California that their youngest child, Elizabeth, was born—marking the family’s full transition from itinerant Americans to rooted Angelenos.
Hollywood at the turn of the century was still more agricultural than urban. Orange groves dominated the landscape, and property ownership defined one’s standing as much as business or profession.
In 1899, Thomas Hudson purchased seven acres in what was then the outskirts of Hollywood, building a family home at the corner of what are now Hollywood Boulevard and Hudson Avenue. At the time, the area was neither boulevard nor avenue in any modern sense, but a loosely organized patchwork of orchards, homes, and speculative streets.
The Hudson property soon became part of Hollywood’s accelerating transformation. As land values rose and subdivision became the engine of growth, families like the Hudsons found themselves shaping the future grid of the city simply by dividing their holdings. In 1903, when the Hudson family subdivided their land, the street running through it officially took their name—Hudson Avenue—embedding Thomas Hudson into Hollywood’s geography.
Earlier plans hint at how fluid street naming still was. An 1887 tract map shows a proposed roadway called “Dae Avenue,” a reference to Daeida Wilcox, the woman whose name is inseparable from Hollywood’s founding. Whether that name was ever formally used remains unclear, but its disappearance underscores how speculative and provisional early street plans could be. By the time the Hudsons acted, their name carried weight—not through civic prominence, but through ownership and permanence.
Thomas Hudson lived long enough to witness Hollywood’s rapid transition from orchard town to budding city. According to his obituary, he died on January 4, 1915, at the age of seventy-two, following an illness of several weeks, at his home at 1635 Hudson Avenue. The notice described him plainly as a “pioneer of Hollywood,” a phrase that, in the early twentieth century, still retained genuine meaning. Hudson had arrived when land was cheap, streets unnamed, and the future uncertain. By the time of his death, Hollywood had begun its irreversible ascent toward fame.
The obituary also records the family he left behind: his widow Lavenia, daughter Blanche Garrett—who had arrived from Council Bluffs following his death—and his son, Thomas Hudson Jr., known as Thomas E. Hudson. Funeral services were held at the Hollywood Cemetery Chapel, further anchoring the Hudson name in the physical and emotional geography of early Los Angeles.
If Hudson Avenue preserves the family name, it does so imperfectly, and with a certain irony. The section of street upon which the Hudsons actually lived—the two-block section that included their house—is no longer Hudson Avenue. In 1994, it was renamed Schrader Boulevard, which removed the geographical connection between the Hudsons and the street that still honors them. Hudson Avenue is still there, but nearby and geographically dislocated from the place for which it was originally named.
The Hudson legacy, however, did not end with Thomas’s death. His son, Thomas E. Hudson, remained in the neighborhood and continued living on Hudson Avenue until his own death in 1955, spanning the period when Hollywood completed its transformation from rural enclave to urban entertainment capital. By then, the street named for his family had long since been absorbed into the city’s dense grid, its origins obscured by apartment houses, traffic, and the amnesia that often accompanies growth.
Hudson Avenue is a typical Hollywood origin story. It was not a monument conceived in a flash of inspiration. It was a functional way to divide property, name and sell identity, and promote occupancy.
It bears the name of one who lost, and had to re-create and transform himself, who left behind his family and left a family behind. It is like many a Hollywood street, a remnant that lives on in memory and obituaries, in maps and dusty old orchard town that was paved over.
To walk Hudson Avenue today is to traverse that layered past—one where a saloonkeeper from Ohio, an orange grove, and a grieving but persistent family helped shape the neighborhood long before cameras arrived to give Hollywood its global meaning.
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