Sign In

Frank Lecouvreur, a noted Southern California surveyor and cartographer, served as Los Angeles City Surveyor in 1868-1869. A native of Ortelsburg, Prussia, Lecouvreur was born in 1829 to a French father and a Prussian mother. Christened Theodor Maximilian Ferdinand Franz Lecouvreur, he anglicized his name to Frank Lecouvreur upon arriving in California in 1851. By 1855 he was in Los Angeles, soon thereafter being employed by Captain Henry Hancock as a flagman on the noted "Hancock Survey." In late 1868 he prepared a important map of the western boundary line of the City of Los Angeles, "from a point one league west of the center of the Plaza to the southwest corner of the city lands surveyed and established by order of the Common Council January 11, 1869, by Frank Lecouvreur, Surveyor." The formal boundary set forth in that map became Boundary Street, which later became Hoover Boulevard or Hoover Street.