San Francisco: Alphabet City

Alphabets in San Francisco's Street Names

The San Francisco street grid is like a basket of cross-cut fries, each an island of streets laid out at the same time, ragged at the edge where it runs up against water or hills or an older neighborhood or a freeway. This is true not just of the streets themselves but of their names. Each new survey or subdivision named a swath of the city by some system or another, sometimes interrupted here or there by a single older or newer name, sometimes obscured altogether by a later mass renaming and barely visible at the bottom of the historical basket.

The pressure of choosing many names all at once for a new neighborhood must have been great. Even though the namers of nearly every section of San Francisco relied on some theme or another -- pioneers, battles, universities, the street names of other cities -- they sometimes had trouble coming up even with an original theme. Successive surveyors repeatedly resorted to the "cheap and indefensible expedient"¹ of naming streets merely by number or letter.

Though several rounds of renaming² replaced some runs of numbered or lettered streets with proper names, in some cases the original patterns can still be detected. It would be too unnatural, when renaming numbered streets, to leave behind one or a few old numbers amid the new names, and a single letter would look silly in a grid of full words, but the letters -- which after all are what make up words -- might stay around. In fact there are no less than eleven complete or partial alphabets embedded in San Francisco's street grid:

• San Francisco's best-known street alphabet is in the east-west streets of the city's west side, from Anza in the Richmond District through the Sunset to Yorba in the Parkside. It began as a plain alphabet to which was assigned mostly Spanish historical names in the great renaming of 1909. The renaming commission also chose two alphabets worth of names for the numbered avenues, but this part of the plan was dropped except for the renaming of First Avenue to Arguello and 49th Avenue to La Playa (one of a few names in the western avenues for which the commission didn't want to start a third alphabet).
• The same renaming turned the Bayview's numbered Avenues South (the neighborhood's east-west streets) directly into alphabetized names, from Arthur (at Islais Creek) to Yosemite, then Armstrong to Nelson and Olney on land (Meade is now the farthest south street which remains from this series) and Pulaski to Sampson in speculative "water streets". 6th Avenue in the Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard, its only numbered street, must be a survivor of this renaming, although it is ten blocks southwest of the line of 6th Avenue South (now Fairfax). At the same time the lettered north-south Streets South were renamed to Alvord (it and Boalt are gone, but Coleman remains) through Upton.³
• The north-south streets of the streetcar suburb of Sunnyside, surveyed in 1890, were given an eclectic collection of mostly geographic names, alphabetized from Acadia in the east to Hamburg (later renamed Ridgewood) in the west.⁴
• In Visitacion Valley, Alpha and Delta Streets stand out as missing the rest of their exotic alphabet. When the Reis Tract, the part of Vis Valley north of Leland, was laid out in 1905, its north-south streets included Alpha, Beta (now part of Rutland), Delta, Elliot (still present), Fay (now part of Sawyer) and Going and Hamlin, which if they were ever built have since been erased.⁵
• Even the few street names required for the Ingleside Terraces "residence park" sent its surveyors fleeing to the inspiration of the alphabet: four streets on its south edge are named Alviso, Borica, Corona and De Soto.
• The Navy wasted no effort naming the streets in their San Francisco outposts, giving the north-south streets of Treasure Island the letters B through N and those in the Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard the letters A through J, plus an unexpected R.
• And finally, a group of streets off of Owens Street in the city's newest neighborhood, Mission Bay, carries on the tradition with the handful of streets named A, B1, B2, B3 and C. They're not on San Francisco's Department of Public Works maps⁶, and online map services vary as to which if any exist, but recent fieldwork by Jef Poskanzer⁷ confirms that A, B, B3 and C streets are still in place.

That makes, if we count Arguello as a one-letter specimen and count the east-west streets in the Bayview as two, no less than eleven alphabets, full or partial or remnant, in San Francisco's street grid. Surely no other city can boast so many. It would be easy to blame our hills, but I like to think that our street names reflect our citizenry, as of course they must: practical when necessary; in love with our past, but prone to experimentation and changing our minds; and much given to decoration and ornamentation.

The contents of this web site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.