A Downtown L.A. street might be renamed Kobe Bryant Boulevard

All of Los Angeles went purple and gold after the untimely death of Lakers legend Kobe Bryant, but the stretch of Downtown L.A. that Bryant called his home court for nearly two decades (the first couple of years of his career were at the Forum) emerged as a particularly moving memorial to Mamba. Now, two council members are taking that memorial to the street, literally.

On Monday, Los Angeles City Council members Curren D. Price, Jr. and Herb Wesson announced plans to rename a stretch of Figueroa Boulevard to Kobe Bryant Boulevard. According to tweets from the two politicians, the renamed street would stretch just over two-and-a-half miles from Olympic Boulevard, at the northern edge of L.A. Live, past the Staples Center and down to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, on the southern edge of Exposition Park.

“Kobe Bryant’s legacy is bigger than basketball,” said Wesson in a statement on social media. “His #MambaMentality inspired all of us to be the best version of ourselves. #KobeBryantBlvd will be a reminder to every Angeleno young and old who drives down it that there is no obstacle too big and that with the Mamba mentality, anything is possible.”

A formal motion to rename the street is expected to be introduced in front of the wider city council, which next convenes on Tuesday, August 25. No timeline for the project has been given yet other than Wesson’s mention of “soon.”

Today’s announcement comes on Kobe Bryant Day, which the city council established in 2016 to honor both of Bryant’s jersey numbers, 8 and 24. It also comes a day after what would have been Bryant’s 42nd birthday, and just shy of the seven-month anniversary of the helicopter crash in Calabasas that took the life of Bryant, as well as his daughter Gianna; pilot Ara Zobayan; basketball coach Christina Mauser; Sarah Chester and her daughter Payton; and baseball coach John Altobelli, as well as his wife Keri and daughter Alyssa.