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Comment by senectus1 | Hacker News Reader

>Main Street in San Francisco was named after Charles Main.

I feel this might be a bit of a cheeky urban legend, or at the very least a coincidence.

"Main st" has been used in western city's and towns for a lot longer than SF has been around.

Yes, but the Main St. in San Francisco hasn't been around nearly as long as SF has. When the downtown grids were laid out, what's now Main St. was underwater. It didn't exist as land, let alone a road that was either significant or central. By the time it was filled in, it was home to Charles Main's mining provision shop.

The other way you can tell that it's not "main" is that it's parallel to 1st Street. Most cities don't have both a Main and a 1st, they have one or the other (which is why "Second Street" is the second-most common street name in the United States behind "Main", with "First" coming in third place). If SF were using Main in the "normal" sense, it would be where 1st is, next to 2nd. Failing that, it would at least be the next block over from 1st, so that 1st was counting from it. Washington, DC, sort of works that way, where there's a "zero street" (North/South Capitol), and then 1st is the next block over. But... SF's Main St. is a full three blocks from 1st. It's just kind of in the middle of nowhere, logically speaking. And that's again because of the landfill situation - 1st St. is the first full block counting from the shoreline at the time the streets were built.

San Francisco’s “Main Street” is in no way a major artery, however. Market Street served that function.

Here’s an 1853 map https://rumsey.geogarage.com/maps/g3463000.html in which today’s Main Street is only a block long. The map calls it Front St, although there’s another Front St nearby which kept the name – perhaps it was renamed Main to disambiguate once the streets connected?

I worked on Main for years and nobody mentioned this urban legend. while the street is not long, I would not put it past bureaucrats to name a random street Main

That map also showcases another example of this - Townsend Street is named after one James Townsend, who was the alcalde [1] in 1848, not for its location at the end of town. (Geary, Leavenworth, and Bryant are also named for pre-statehood alcaldes, but their names are less amusingly coincidental.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcalde

Ooohh, so 1st St made sense back then. I always wondered why SF needed like a -4th St.

It could (conceivably) be that "in San Francisco" is meant literally, and that in San Francisco it's true, even if not the case for other instances of "Main Street" elsewhere, however; a cursory web search leads me to think "urban legend" is by far the more likely. It's always been my understanding that "Main Street" either is currently, or was at some time nearer the town / city's beginning the main street that went through "downtown".

It is literally true specifically for San Francisco. The street now named Main in San Francisco didn't exist for the first few decades after the city's founding and grid-laying (it was underwater, just off shore in San Francisco Bay!), and at no point has it been a street of any particular prominence.

> at no point has it been a street of any particular prominence

It’s a good street, Brent.

(There’s actually good motorcycle parking just off Market I used to use all the time when I worked downtown.)

In the heart of the Georgian city of Bath we have 3 streets designed by the architect John Wood.

The streets are named Quiet St, John St and Wood St. It is claimed that the naming of these streets is based on the 3 words most regularly used in the clearly passionate council meetings of the time.

Or done in the first place for the sake of the double meaning

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