- By Ray Holt -
How La Costa Glen's distinctive street names were chosen and adopted immediately arouses questions such as: From where or whom did they come? Who chose them? Who approved them? What is a Rush Rose or a Lemonberry? Why not good old names like chrysanthemums, lilies, daises, etc?
The facts are logical enough when recalled by Marketing Director Michael O'Conner. He vividly remembers the task of street naming that began eight or nine years ago. In fact a list of streets and their names were among the City of Carlsbad's initial requirements for City approval of La Costa Glen. The purpose was to prevent the duplication or confusion of new street names with those of existing streets including those names already approved for other future developments. This also required adherence to the themes the City had adopted for each area of Carlsbad.
Learning that the theme for La Costa Glen was "seabirds and plant life of the local area," the Glen's developers went to work. Reality struck immediately: nearly all the usable words for seabirds were already reserved for another development. This left the Glen with the theme of things representing local plant life.
Help was first asked of landscape architects and botanists. This proved futile when the names produced were in Latin or unappetizing such as Creosote Bush, Monkey Wart and Old Man Cactus. Meanwhile, the City decided the entry road from El Camino would be a continuation of Levante rather than La Costa Glen as our developer proposed.
(To be continued next month...)