Should the Area around Silver Lake be Called North Central? The 405 Freeway the Murray Freeway?

Identity can be a topic that gets people talking, good or bad. Recently, there's been an effort to rename a part of Los Angeles commonly, but erroneously, called The Eastside. And in Sacramento, some want to officially rename the 405 Freeway in honor of a fellow politician.

When it comes to people calling Echo Park, Silver Lake, East Hollywood and Los Feliz "the Eastside," it definitely makes for some heated, if not sometimes downright nasty, debate. That's why Curbed LA over the past couple of weeks called for submissions and voting on what to rename that region. After an admittedly stuffed ballot box, the very straightforward North Central easily won out. Will it catch on? "Where do you live?" "Oh, you know, in North Central LA neighborhood of Silver Lake."

On the politics side of things, a proposed bill is making its way through the California legislature to rename a portion of the 405 Freeway after former Assemblymember and State Senator Kevin Murray, reports the LA Times via the Sacramento Bee. Columnist Dan Walters notes that "Murray's hopes of extending his career vanished on a December afternoon in 1998, just days after his being sworn in as a state senator, when a Los Angeles County park police officer found him with a prostitute in Murray's state-leased black Corvette, parked outside John Anson Ford Theater."