SFStreets: History of San Francisco place names | Hacker News Reader

SFStreets: History of San Francisco place names

sfstreets.noahveltman.com

56 pointsjxmorris1225 comments

I extracted all the history information to a single file if others like me would find this useful: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/d3cikbe5siw4uuiurcd...

(Though I do love the website's interface)

Thank you - way better honestly

If you like Main being named after Charles Main, maybe I can interest you in this list of unexpected eponyms https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39462516 (worth it for the comments)

A French Drain has nothing to do with France! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_drain

OpenAI Deep Research is great for this. Here's a report about College Hill, a small area of SF between Bernal Heights and Glen Park:

https://chatgpt.com/share/685b0890-fa44-8013-adce-8db2855d13...

(Glen Park Library is where Ross Ulbricht was arrested.)

Here's a similar one about Colliers Wood (South London), another small area whose location is often described as 'between X and Y' (in this case, Tooting and Wimbledon):

https://chatgpt.com/share/685b09a4-14f0-8013-ad2c-3c2c7f8c25...

I worked on a project long time ago similar to this. I had to dig up old maps from major public libraries across a handful of cities and overlay them on top of modern maps using key historical landmarks and geographical features. It’s amazing how cities evolve and transform over time. I think what would be cool is if someone could build a street-level time capsule of places like New York. Perhaps monthly or even daily.

There was/is a website that's a bit like google maps, but with historical map overlays. I cannot for the life of me remember the name.

Pastmaps might be what you're thinking of? They have an archive of the maps that the United States Geological Survey used to serve as their Historical Topographic Map Collection.

USGS has this on their topoview site:

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/

Pick the area you want to look at, select a historical topo map, and click the Show button. Then you can use the Transparency slider to see the topo map overlaid on a current street map.

You can discover some interesting things this way. For example, I used to live on Hawthorne Avenue in Palo Alto (CA). The 1897 topo map shows that this street was originally a railroad spur line off the main Southern Pacific track (now used by Caltrain and freight). This spur line turned left onto what is now Middlefield and then turned right to serve the Catholic University (now St. Patrick's Seminary).

Thanks for occupying my past few hours (great USGS link!).

It's crazy to me how many errors are on these official maps (even in to present day, e.g.: roads that don't actually exist), particularly the newer maps creating connections between roadways which don't actually exist (I imagine this is image-recognition errors, when former human techs used to actually field verify everything).

Prolly not the case here, but an interesting tidbit in cartography are so called trap streets, fake streets, towns, to trap plagiarists.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

My favorite example is the trap town Agloe, New York:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York

NYPL Map Warper, unfortunately now defunct: https://wayback.archive-it.org/13216/20210520171637/http://m...

This is unbelievably cool. I would love to see the same for the Twin Cities, or Seattle.

This has been here before, but nice to see it again.

If only this answered the great puzzle of San Francisco street names - why are the state-named streets in Potrero Hill and the Mission in that order?

So it has! Macroexpanded:

Interactive map shows history of San Francisco place names - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16747029 - April 2018 (1 comment)

History of San Francisco Place Names - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5628182 - April 2013 (29 comments)

Wow, over a decade of HN relevance!

I presume it was the order the respective ships were built/launched.

NB: the streets are named after ships that are named after states

I've seen people say that, but I've also seen that the timing doesn't work out (the streets came before the ships), so I don't know what to believe.

Where's Minna street :))

https://fernhilltours.com/2023/09/12/minna-street-whos-it-na...

There's a local sf rumor that it's named after smthing else

I did not see my Powell St, parallel to Mason & Stockton St.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Street has: "The street was named for Dr. William J. Powell, surgeon of the U.S. sloop of war Warren, which was active during the conquest of California.[1]".

That comes from this document on the website of the Museum of the City of San Francisco: https://sfmuseum.org/street/stnames5.html

Seems like that would be a good additional source to add to the map.

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