SFStreets: History of San Francisco place names

http://sfstreets.noahveltman.com/

56•jxmorris12•7mo ago

Comments

madcaptenor•7mo ago

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?

dang•7mo ago

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)

thrownblown•7mo ago

Wow, over a decade of HN relevance!

derwiki•7mo ago

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

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

madcaptenor•7mo ago

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.

yogurtboy•7mo ago

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

lvl155•7mo ago

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.

SirFatty•7mo ago

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.

cbhl•7mo ago

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.

Stratoscope•7mo ago

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).

ProllyInfamous•7mo ago

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).

thenthenthen•7mo ago

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

Stratoscope•7mo ago

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

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

test098•7mo ago

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

wagwang•7mo ago

Where's Minna street :))

madcaptenor•7mo ago

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

wagwang•7mo ago

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

varenc•7mo ago

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)

nickpinkston•7mo ago

Thank you - way better honestly

davchana•7mo ago

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

madcaptenor•7mo ago

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.

rahimnathwani•7mo ago

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...

1-more•7mo ago

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/

madcaptenor•7mo ago

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

conover•7mo ago

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

1979: The Model World of Robert Symes [video]

Satellites Have a Lot of Room

1980s Farm Crisis

Show HN: FSID - Identifier for files and directories (like ISBN for Books)

Show HN: Holy Grail: Open-Source Autonomous Development Agent

Show HN: Minecraft Creeper meets 90s Tamagotchi

Show HN: Termiteam – Control center for multiple AI agent terminals

The only U.S. particle collider shuts down

Ask HN: Why do purchased B2B email lists still have such poor deliverability?

Show HN: Remotion directory (videos and prompts)

Portable C Compiler

Show HN: Kokki – A "Dual-Core" System Prompt to Reduce LLM Hallucinations

Software Engineering Transformation 2026

Microsoft purges Win11 printer drivers, devices on borrowed time

Lunch with the FT: Tarek Mansour

Old Mexico and her lost provinces (1883)

'AI' is a dick move, redux

The source code was the moat. But not anymore

Does anyone else feel like their inbox has become their job?

An AI model that can read and diagnose a brain MRI in seconds

Dev with 5 of experience switched to Rails, what should I be careful about?

AlphaFace: High Fidelity and Real-Time Face Swapper Robust to Facial Pose

Scientists discover “levitating” time crystals that you can hold in your hand

Rammstein – Deutschland (C64 Cover, Real SID, 8-bit – 2019) [video]

Tell HN: Yet Another Round of Zendesk Spam

Postgres Message Queue (PGMQ)

Show HN: Django-rclone: Database and media backups for Django, powered by rclone

NY lawmakers proposed statewide data center moratorium

OpenClaw AI chatbots are running amok – these scientists are listening in

Show HN: AI agent forgets user preferences every session. This fixes it

1979: The Model World of Robert Symes [video]

Satellites Have a Lot of Room

1980s Farm Crisis

Show HN: FSID - Identifier for files and directories (like ISBN for Books)

Show HN: Holy Grail: Open-Source Autonomous Development Agent

Show HN: Minecraft Creeper meets 90s Tamagotchi

Show HN: Termiteam – Control center for multiple AI agent terminals

The only U.S. particle collider shuts down

Ask HN: Why do purchased B2B email lists still have such poor deliverability?

Show HN: Remotion directory (videos and prompts)

Portable C Compiler

Show HN: Kokki – A "Dual-Core" System Prompt to Reduce LLM Hallucinations

Software Engineering Transformation 2026

Microsoft purges Win11 printer drivers, devices on borrowed time

Lunch with the FT: Tarek Mansour

Old Mexico and her lost provinces (1883)

'AI' is a dick move, redux

The source code was the moat. But not anymore

Does anyone else feel like their inbox has become their job?

An AI model that can read and diagnose a brain MRI in seconds

Dev with 5 of experience switched to Rails, what should I be careful about?

AlphaFace: High Fidelity and Real-Time Face Swapper Robust to Facial Pose

Scientists discover “levitating” time crystals that you can hold in your hand

Rammstein – Deutschland (C64 Cover, Real SID, 8-bit – 2019) [video]

Tell HN: Yet Another Round of Zendesk Spam

Postgres Message Queue (PGMQ)

Show HN: Django-rclone: Database and media backups for Django, powered by rclone

NY lawmakers proposed statewide data center moratorium

OpenClaw AI chatbots are running amok – these scientists are listening in

Show HN: AI agent forgets user preferences every session. This fixes it

SFStreets: History of San Francisco place names

Comments