We say their names without thinking. Meet me on Del Mar. Head down Golden Lantern. Take Ortega over the hill. Come through La Pata.
They’ve become directions more than words, repeated so often that most of us stopped hearing them a long time ago. But look a little closer at the roads connecting San Clemente, Dana Point and San Juan Capistrano and they begin to tell a story of the coast itself. Some names describe exactly what was here. Others were chosen to create an idea of what a place might become. And a few have stories considerably more interesting than the ones we’ve been telling about them.
AVENIDA DEL MAR | SAN CLEMENTE
For anyone who lives in San Clemente, Del Mar barely registers as Spanish anymore. It’s simply Del Mar: downtown, dinner, shopping, the street that leads toward the pier.
The name translates to “of the sea,” but here’s the part you may not know: Avenida Del Mar was originally a horse trail. When Ole Hanson began developing his planned “Spanish Village by the Sea” in 1925, that trail became the central avenue of his new town. And Hanson wasn't thinking small. He called for streets as wide as 80 feet and made Avenida Del Mar wider than the state highway running through town. When his engineers questioned it, his response was essentially: the state could catch up.
The intersection of Del Mar and El Camino Real was also where San Clemente really began. A giant sales tent was erected there before there was much of a town at all. On a rainy December day in 1925, 600 people eventually crowded inside to hear Hanson make his pitch for the place he imagined. By the end of the day, more than $125,000 worth of property had been sold.
Nearly a century later, there’s something wonderfully literal about the name. Follow Avenida Del Mar west and, eventually, you arrive exactly where it promised you would.
THE LANTERNS | DANA POINT
Golden. Blue. Ruby. Amber. Violet. Green.
Dana Point's Lantern streets may be the most distinctive street names anywhere along the South County coast, and there's a good chance you've heard an explanation for them. One popular version says ships anchored offshore once used different colored lanterns to signal what they carried.
Great story. Apparently not true.
The Dana Point Historical Society has found no factual basis for it. The real story begins with the development of Dana Point in the 1920s, when streets that had fairly ordinary names began becoming the Streets of the Blue, Ruby, Amber and Green Lantern. Developer Sidney H. Woodruff and other early investors expanded the idea as part of a larger nautical identity for the new seaside community.
And they didn't stop at the names. Actual ship-inspired streetlights were installed, with colored elements corresponding to the Lantern streets. In July 1929, California Governor C.C. Young ceremonially threw the switch on 400 ornamental lights illuminating Dana Point.
Today we say “take Golden Lantern” without giving much thought to why a major road has such an unusual name. Nearly a century ago, though, the lanterns were part of something much more ambitious: an attempt to give a new coastal town an identity before much of the town even existed.
ORTEGA | SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO
Ortega is another name we use so often that it’s easy to forget there was an Ortega.
José Francisco Ortega was the pathfinder for the 1769 Portolá expedition, the first recorded European land expedition through Alta California. He traveled north from Baja California with the expedition that included Gaspar de Portolá and Junípero Serra, helping establish the route that would eventually become known as El Camino Real.
More than 160 years later, his name was given to the highway climbing east from San Juan Capistrano across the Santa Ana Mountains. And building it was no small undertaking. Completed in 1932, the road climbed to roughly 2,700 feet through what had previously been chaparral-covered backcountry, finally creating a direct automobile connection between Orange and Riverside counties. It came in more than six months ahead of schedule and nearly $100,000 under its original $675,000 budget. In 1939, it became part of State Route 74.
Thousands of us still say “take Ortega” as casually as we say “take the 5.” The name has become so embedded in the geography that the person behind it has almost completely disappeared.
LA PATA | SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO + SAN CLEMENTE
La Pata feels thoroughly modern, particularly now that the road connects San Juan Capistrano directly with San Clemente. But the name is considerably older than the connection.
“La pata” translates literally to “the leg,” although exactly how the road acquired the name is surprisingly difficult to pin down. What we do know is that La Pata appeared on Orange County transportation plans as early as 1963, and a portion was built in the 1970s as a dead-end road providing access to the Prima Deshecha landfill.
For decades, that was essentially the story: La Pata headed south from Ortega Highway and stopped.
Then, in 2016, the long-planned gap finally closed. The road was extended through the hills to San Clemente, creating a direct connection between the two cities that had existed on transportation plans for more than half a century.
There’s something particularly interesting about La Pata because many of us remember the before and after. We remember when the road simply ended. Now we take it between San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano without thinking twice.
Of all the names in this story, La Pata may be the one whose origin is least clear. Yet its evolution is the one we actually watched happen.
We drive these streets because they get us somewhere. But their names carry pieces of what came before: a horse trail that became the heart of a new town, colored lanterns imagined for a community that barely existed, the name of a Spanish pathfinder carried onto a mountain highway, and a dead-end road that finally went somewhere.
Most days, they’re just directions.
Every once in a while, they’re worth listening to.
