Dateline>City of Angels

Catching up on my web browsing, I see that the Big Orange Landmarks blog recently got to the Shakespeare Bridge in the Franklin Hills neighborhood, managing to attract the attention of a Los Angeles Times literary blog in the process.

Kudos to Big Orange’s blogger, who writes under the pseudonym Floyd B. Bariscale! Whoever he is, I really enjoy his one-by-one visits to L.A.’s long series of designated historical-cultural landmarks. (Even more, I admire his ability to simply get out, explore and photograph them on a regular basis.)

In regards to the bridge (which I happen to enjoy crossing each morning during my daily “coffee runs” to Los Feliz), Bariscale notes that the origins of its Shakespearian moniker remain a mystery…

Oh. And the reason it’s called Shakespeare Bridge? You got me. But, then again, what’s in a name? That which we call a road by any other name would still be a street.

Like everyone else in this part of town, I have my own personal theory on the name, which I can’t really prove, but which probably makes as much sense as any other.

When I was growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, people often called old 1920s “Storybook” homes “Shakespearian Architecture.” It wasn’t an “official” architectural term, but rather more of a popular colloquialism here in Southern California. The Franklin Bridge, of course, exhibits strong Storybook cues, and after it was built locals probably applied the colloquialism to it as a sort of shorthand reference. Eventually it stuck as a permanent name.

If this proposed nexus seems a little far-fetched, a quick Google on the topic reveals this article, which makes a similar connection between the terms for a home in the Vancouver region.

Incidentally, I can’t help but also smell a Disney connection to the “Shakespeare Bridge” and Storybook architecture in general. Seems that Uncle Walt actually lived in a modest Storybook house just a few blocks from the bridge. Meanwhile, just a stone throw away in Atwater, you’ll find the Tam O’Shanter, a Storybook-style restaurant that reportedly was a favorite hangout for Disney employees, who worked in Walt’s original studio along Hyperion Avenue in Silver Lake.

The Storybook style was fairly ubiquitous in early Silver Lake (which back then included the Franklin Hills district). The architecture, of course, was also a prominent feature in the settings and backgrounds of many early Disney cartoons. How much Silver Lake’s fanciful homes inspired Disney animators (or vice versa) is anyone’s guess, but I’d venture a no-brainer that the influence was significant.