Saluting the Saints on Street Signs

J. Michael Walker is nuts about Los Angeles history, but that’s not really his calling. “I’m an artist, not a historian,” said the 48-year-old transplant from Little Rock, Ark.

Nevertheless, Walker is in the midst of a three-year quest to learn as much as he can about the 78 streets in the City of the Angels that are named after saints and to honor them by creating pieces of art that tell the streets’ history.

The result so far has been the appearance of several 6-foot by 4-foot personalized prints at MTA bus shelters near the streets. Twenty-three in all have appeared at selected bus stops in the city’s core and on the Eastside.

“Well, this is different,” bus rider Tom Sullivan of Monterey Park said as he squinted the other day at one of the prints commemorating St. Louis Street in Boyle Heights. “This isn’t promoting some movie. This is promoting history.”

That’s what city officials hoped for when they gave $6,500 to Walker earlier this year to pay tribute to the city’s saints and streets. They wanted an innovative artist to offer high-quality work with some social relevance.

“He’s surpassed our expectations,” said Arlene Chikami, director of grants for the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

So, from Santa Monica Boulevard and St. Vincent Place to San Pedro Street and Santa Fe Avenue, Walker has set out to tell the stories of Los Angeles’ saints.

His interest in history, he said, began when he left Oklahoma, where he was in college, to visit Mexico in 1974. He immediately became immersed in Mexican culture, native customs and Catholicism. “I intended to stay two weeks, but I really stayed for the rest of my life,” he said.

Walker moved to Los Angeles in 1976, and shortly afterward married a woman who was a member of the Tarahumara Indian tribe. He then got interested in city history.

“As a visual artist, with the influence of Latin American colonial art, it occurred to me that it was an appropriate way to talk about life in Los Angeles,” he said.

Armed with the small city grant, Walker began researching the streets in March. He confirmed the number of streets named after saints--78--with Linda Arnold in the city’s Bureau of Engineering, who is the acknowledged expert on street names in Los Angeles.

Then, he studied the histories of the saints.

He visited some of the streets, took in the ambience and chatted with residents in hopes of trying to make sense of a street’s name and its place in Los Angeles.

In the case of Santa Monica Boulevard, which dates back to 1893, Walker’s print recounts how the first Spaniards passed through land where the city of Santa Monica now stands. They found a spring where the travelers said the waters were “as pure as the tears of Santa Monica.”

Santa Monica shed many tears in her life as she prayed for a wayward son to change his ways. Eventually, he did, becoming St. Augustine. His mother was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church for her devotion to him, becoming a patron for anxious mothers and at-risk youths.

That is particularly relevant for immigrant mothers who live near the boulevard in gang-plagued areas of East Hollywood and Silver Lake. “I am worried about my son,” said Marta Gomez as she glanced at Walker’s print at a bus shelter at MacArthur Park.

Sometimes, local history is mixed in.

The poster commemorating Boyle Heights’ St. Louis Street, named in 1875, features the likeness of developer William H. Workman, whose subdivision there turned it into the city’s first suburb in 1876. It also shows an 1887 newspaper ad trumpeting the sale of city view tracts in the area.

The street shares its name with the Missouri city on the Mississippi River, St. Louis, which was named for King Louis IX of France. He was revered for his devotion to church teachings, including his futile attempt to rid France of prostitutes.

He is the patron saint of France. An order of nuns, the Sisters of St. Louis, was established in France in 1842. The order has spread to other countries, including the U.S.

Sullivan, the rider who saw Walker’s print at a bus shelter at the corner of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and Soto Street, waved off several buses as he studied the history of the French king.

“I didn’t know any of this,” he said.

One print depicting San Julian, the patron saint of wanderers, was stolen from a bus shelter at the Civic Center, leading some to think that a homeless person was so impressed that he took it.

Walker’s quest to commemorate all of the city’s streets named for saints is not finished.

Getting by on the $6,500 grant and contributions from friends, he has completed posters for only 21 of the 78 streets. And some of the first prints have already been removed from bus shelters.

To drum up interest, he is scheduled to talk about his pursuit of the saints on Sunday at the Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park.

Romaine Ahlstrom, a librarian at the Huntington Library who donated money to pay for the production of the St. Louis poster, is willing to pay for more of Walker’s saint prints because she thinks they are valuable in learning about Los Angeles history.

“If I had more money,” she said, “I’d buy more of them.”