How EP Streets Got Names: Saul Kleinfeld

Introducing a new, weekly feature: How the Streets in El Paso got Their Names.

How many times have you driven in El Paso and wondered, “Who was the ‘Resler’ that the street is named after?”  Most of us have at least a vague idea of who Lee Trevino was. But not ever street and thoroughfare in El Paso is named for someone famous.

Today: Saul Kleinfeld

The guy the street is named for isn’t a golfer or baseball player (El Paso has a couple well-known residential areas named after golfers and baseball players).

The original Saul Kleinfeld (he has a namesake grandson that would be in his 30s now) was a transplant to El Paso from New Jersey. The story goes that he and his wife were planning to move to California. They stopped along the way (as the story goes) and had a steak in Juarez that only cost them 35 cents. They decided to forget California and settled in El Paso.

O.G. Saul Kleinfeld, born in 1910, had been a high school athlete.  He was a humanitarian who did lots of work on behave of needy children and a promoter of sports both locally and on a statewide level.  In 1969, Saul was named “Citizen of the Year”.

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Saul Kleinfeld passed away in 1998. A few years later, as the city expanded eastward, a major artery was named after Saul.

There’s a great El Paso Times article from the mid-nineties. Check it out in the above link!