History of San Francisco Place Names

http://sfstreets.noahveltman.com/

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

96 29 13 years ago

sfstreets.noahveltman.com

martinoma• 13 years ago

This is awesome. It would be cool to see neighborhood names, too, when they aren't linked directly to a street

PaulHoule2• 13 years ago

neighborhoods are actually easier than streets because you can find neighborhood polygons in many databases... this must have involved linking up Wikipedia with a real GIS database like Open Street Maps. I'd love to hear more about how it was done!

veltman7• 13 years ago

Yeah, there are lots of categories like neighborhood names that have their own interesting stories but I wasn't sure how to display. Definitely lots of room for improvement, there are also plenty of gaps in the streets, I'll hopefully be able to fill some of those in in the coming weeks.

chadlpowell• 13 years ago

super cool!

smoyer• 13 years ago

Bookmarked! I'm going to use this when I'm cruising around the city next time (perhaps OracleWorld/JavaOne).

veltman7• 13 years ago

FYI, if you view it on your phone, you should be able to use the link in the lower-right corner to zoom to your current location!

PaulHoule2• 13 years ago

Sweet! How did you reconcile Wikipedia concepts with the line geography of streets?

maxerickson• 13 years ago

It looks like it was a manual process:

https://twitter.com/veltman/status/328613691392143360

saltzman• 13 years ago

dude this kicks so much ass.

veltman7• 13 years ago

Hey guys, I made this map. Happy to answer any questions about how it was done, I'm going to do a detailed writeup when I have a chance. The short version is: no Wikipedia link-up, it's all manual research from archives, books, and sites (including Wikipedia). There are lots of Wikipedia links included but that's just for people who want more detail than I included in the descriptions. I parsed the street/polygon geometry from OSM and tied it together with Leaflet and then added lots of nitpicky extra design choices in JS.

hkmurakami3• 13 years ago

Wow! I take it that history of SF is a personal interest of yours?

veltman7• 13 years ago

Well, I'm interested in history generally, but I'm not sure I was an SF history obsessive going into this project. I was just interested in the fact that I was surrounded by streets that were clearly all named after people and I had no idea who they were. I thought a map like this would be a cool way to see those same streets I walk/drive down all the time a little differently.

ebiester• 13 years ago

It's great! Any chance you could overlay the neighborhoods and their name origins?

jcr• 13 years ago

It would be fun, but really tough, and occasionally impossible.

Not all of the origins of the names of neighborhoods are known. The one I've always wondered about was the "Tender Loin"/"Tenderloin" district of SF. There are a lot of anecdotes about the origin of this name [1] but no one has a definitive answer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco

veltman7• 13 years ago

I'm going to add a version of this soon! Not overlays, but at least popping up the neighborhood name histories when you use the "Jump To" neighborhoods list in the corner. I didn't make it too high a priority since most of them are either duplicates of street histories (e.g. Cole Valley, Upper Haight, the Mission) or self-explanatory (e.g. the Sunset, Chinatown, the Marina).

jcl• 13 years ago

Very nice. I've been curious about the origin of Gough Street and was quite amused by the explanation:

Charles H. Gough - A local milkman who served on the 1855 committee tasked with naming the streets of the Western Addition. He named Gough Street after himself and Octavia Street after his sister, and may have named Steiner Street after a friend.

supersillyus• 13 years ago

According to Last Call by Daniel Okrent, Gough St was named after famed temperance orator John Bartholomew Gough. I'd assumed that was true until I saw this site. Wikipedia has support for both theories, but it looks like Charles H was the real namesake.

dangrover• 13 years ago

Also amusing: Main St. was named after Charles Main.

prawn• 13 years ago

Been planning on making an app that does this based on current location. The government in South Australia lists source information like this along with almost every named street, suburb, etc. Should be standard worldwide IMO.

asveikau• 13 years ago

One item of curiosity: We all know who recognizable figures such as Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and MLK Jr. are. When did they decide to name streets after them?

veltman7• 13 years ago

Been planning to add this, dates for when the street got its current name (when available). Coming soon!

jesusabdullah• 13 years ago

Equal representation for O-Town!! What's the history of T-graph? Peralta? San Parblo? I bet MLK (nee Grove) has some interesting history.

(I assume T-graph followed a telegraph route between Oakland and Berkeley. I more or less know where West MacArf got its name.)

enf• 13 years ago

MacArthur is for General Douglas MacArthur. It was cobbled together from a bunch of existing streets to provide a through route to the Bay Bridge when the bridge was new.

San Pablo is the road to the town of San Pablo.

Peralta is from Don Luís María Peralta, owner of Rancho San Antonio.

veltman7• 13 years ago

I would imagine there's a lot of overlap in the names! Plenty of the SF streets are for figures of general California/Bay Area history, not purely local figures. There are also a bunch of folks like Jack London and Ralph Kirkham who had some notoriety in both cities.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

I've always wondered if Howard Beale in the film Network was named after the intersection of those streets in SF. Alas, this does not answer that question.

brini• 13 years ago

Thanks for this. I've heard that some of the alleys south of Market got their names from the proprietors of brothels in that area, such as Minna, Natoma, Tehama, Clementina. Can anyone debunk/confirm this?

History of San Francisco Place Names

Related Stories