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Comment by veltman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

I remember reading that Palo Alto streets (or maybe some subsection of them) are named after Authors. I've always been curious about this, but never looked into researching it further.

Maybe I'll give it a shot now :)

Yes. A good number of streets are named after famous authors. I used to live on on Poe St. and remember seeing Byron, Seneca, Kipling, and Homer (and others I can't remember). A subsection of streets close to Stanford is also named after famous colleges. In general, I think its a good strategy for a University town to surround citizens with subtle reminders of famous/successful examples of education and the educated.

IIRC, streets in downtown Santa Monica are also named after universities.

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

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

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).

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