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Themes in San Francisco Street Names

By Dave Schweisguth (email: dave at schweisguth dot org)
Last updated Feb. 19, 2026

San Francisco's streets are a canvas covered with brushstrokes of naming, from the broad and well-known to details that are easily missed. Later coats are sometimes incomplete, leaving streaks of the earlier theme showing through the later. Systems of street naming are easiest to find among more recently named neighborhoods and subdivisions that were developed as wholes, but even the oldest part of the city has some unifying order if one looks closely.

This article is a high-level survey, based mostly on direct observation of the city today, Louis Loewenstein's "Streets of San Francisco"¹ and maps available online. Loewenstein provides the namesakes of many streets (non-obvious etymologies given in this article and not otherwise explained are his), and also touches on some of the themes in naming noted here (though mostly only in entries on individual streets). It would likely take considerable research to directly document why more streets are named what they are than he already did. I haven't noted every place where he did or did not explain a street's name or place it in a group. Dates when streets were named and previous names of streets that were renamed (a frequent occurrence) come from the Department of Public Works' key maps² unless stated otherwise. I have noticed some themes that I haven't seen pointed out anywhere previously. In some cases finding a theme in an area made it possible to infer the namesakes of additional streets in that area.

Places

Names taken from local geography are everywhere in the city. Almost every hill and neighborhood (which are often themselves namesakes of one another) has a street named for it, or vice versa. Streets named for places outside of San Francisco, even outside of California, are less to be expected.

Hometowns. One of the very first inspirations for street naming in San Francisco was the streets of the cities from which its first American inhabitants migrated. The most often-imitated East Coast street plan was Philadelphia's, which combined convenient numbered north-south streets and east-west streets mostly named for common nouns, especially trees. Early surveyor Jasper O'Farrell had lived in Philadelphia and borrowed many names from it, including Market, Sansom(e), Pine, Filbert, Lombard and Chestnut. O'Farrell also established South of Market's Philadelphia-like naming scheme, with numbered north-south streets. The name Front for a waterfront street created by landfill also likely came from Philadelphia. And the mostly non-native tree names of the north-south Streets in Presidio Heights might also be taken from those in Philadelphia, though Philadelphia has no Laurel or Maple Street. New York City, dominated by an uninspiring entirely numeric grid, contributed only Broadway and Greenwich.^{3 pp. 105-106, 1 p. 2}

States. Only a few streets scattered around San Francisco have the names of entire American cities outside of California. But a well-known swath of twenty-five streets in the eastern Mission District, Potrero Hill and Dogpatch is named for American states, from Alabama Street in the west to Maryland Street in the east. A twenty-sixth, Kentucky Street, was renamed to part of Third Street. The next street east of Maryland Street, Delaware Street, was once the Potrero Point quay; it disappeared under fill but is about to reemerge in development of the former Potrero Power Station.^{5 p. 147} Another ten or so state Streets were mapped offshore in anticipation of more of the Bay being filled in. Although York, Hampshire and Mexico Streets (the last was offshore) appear to have been named for New York, New Hampshire and New Mexico without their "New", perhaps to avoid the implication that there were old streets with those names, there was also an underwater New York Street.⁶

Countries and capitals. Most of the Excelsior District's east-west Avenues are named for countries. Avalon, Excelsior and Peru Avenues were originally Japan, China and India, renamed during an era of anti-Asian feeling in the late 1800s.⁷ Amazon Avenue was the district's original southern boundary.⁸ The Excelsior's north-south Streets are European capitals, counting Scotland and Ireland as nations. When these streets were named around 1869, Munich was still the capital of the independent Kingdom of Bavaria, and it was only about eight years since the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, whose capital was Naples, had become part of the unified Kingdom of Italy. Geneva Avenue was not originally part of the Excelsior's United Nations; before 1918 it extended only from Ocean Avenue to Mission Street, passing a body of water named Lake Geneva at what today is Cayuga Avenue.⁶ Some of the Excelsior's north-south streets were later extended south of Geneva into Crocker-Amazon, which also included the fabled Andalusian cities Cordova and Seville (not capitals) in its miscellany of street names when it was laid out in 1912.

Spain is also recalled by the street names in the Marina District, which refer to a mix of places, people and things. Memories of England appear in several places around the city: adjacent Windsor Place and Castle Street on Telegraph Hill, not far from Nottingham Place on Kearny; Surrey and Sussex in Glen Park; the Merritt Terrace subdivision between Edgehill and West Portal; the Shakespearean Ardenwood and Avon Ways off the east end of Sloat Blvd., not far from Stratford Drive to the south; and Buckingham Way and Winston Drive around the Stonestown Galleria, though none of these quite qualify as themed neighborhoods. Adelaide and Hobart Alleys (the former renamed Isadora Duncan Lane, but remembered in its transitional street sign and an eponymous hostel) made a more convincing Little Australia in the early 2000s when Australia Fair was just up the hill on Sutter at Taylor.

California cities. Early San Francisco recognized only a few other California cities in its street names, perhaps because few had yet grown to importance. Only Sacramento, San Bruno, San Jose and Monterey are commemorated by prominent streets, each in a different part of the city. (Fremont, Folsom, Stockton and Vallejo Streets are named for the same pioneers as those cities.) The St. Francis Wood development took a big leap forward in other cities' representation by naming nearly all of its streets, about fifteen of them, after missions and important ranchos, all of which developed into cities and towns. That those missions and ranchos all had the names of Spanish saints makes it hard to tell that the streets are named after the places, not the saints.

California's counties were at one time more prominently celebrated than its cities in San Francisco streets: The numbered east-west Streets in Potrero Hill and Dogpatch were at one time all named after California counties. That evocative scheme was unfortunately mostly erased in 1895, when the numeric names of the Mission District's east-west streets were extended eastward to cover Potrero Hill and Dogpatch. Only a handful of now mostly short streets retained their county names: Alameda, Mariposa, Sierra, Madera, Marin and Tulare.

Three Daly City streets extend just into San Francisco near Daly City BART, adding their place names to San Francisco's street grid: Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and San Diego Avenues. Nearby streets give no clue as to whether these three are named for the missions, the cities or the counties.

People

Streets that commemorate pioneers, politicians and developers, and their family members, are everywhere around the city, too numerous to discuss. Streets named for other sorts of persons stand out from the crowd.

The gods. The very first individuals (in Roman mythology) are immortalized in two San Francisco neighborhoods. Uranus, Saturn, Mars and Vulcan reign on Mount Olympus, and ten of their divine relatives reside in Silver Terrace, on Streets off Thornton and Williams Avenues. The latter pantheon includes the lesser-known goddesses Flora (of flowers and spring), Pomona (fruit) and Latona (mother of Apollo and Diana).

Native Americans. Fourteen streets in Mission Terrace and the Outer Mission, in the area developed by the West End Homestead Association, are named for native American peoples, mostly of the northeastern United States, or in their languages. Delaware Avenue was another before it was renamed Delano. Seven of those original names were also the names of counties in New York State, including one, Otsego, the name of a place rather than of a prominent tribe, which supports the possibility that those counties partly inspired the area's street names.^a Elsewhere in the city, two streets in eastern Bernal Heights, Massasoit and Samoset, are named for Wampanoag leaders, allies of Plymouth Colony; Powhattan Avenue, which might be named for the people or their leader, is not far away to the southwest. Only a single alley in Glen Park, Ohlone Way, clearly directly honors California's natives; Modoc Avenue in the West End tract, Mono Street in Upper Market, Natoma and Tehama Streets south of Market and Yosemite Avenue in the Bayview might be named for those peoples or for places named for them.

Spaniards. Spanish names are everywhere in San Francisco. But several parts of the city were systematically given Spanish people's names:

• The western neighborhoods' east-west streets were originally named A through P Streets. (D became an extension of Fulton and E, F and G were displaced by Golden Gate Park.) The developers of the Parkside continued the alphabet, but with names (perhaps anticipating the coming renaming), naming their east-west streets mostly after Spanish settlers, Quintara through Xavier. In 1909, a city commission renamed the lettered Streets similarly, but gave H through L Streets European-American names to appease residents who objected to Spanish,^b and renamed Xavier to Yorba to be easier to pronounce.^{4, c}
• Forest Hill's Avenues are named for Spanish explorers, including several members of the Anza expedition (Linares, Lopez, Sola) and others: Castenada, Cortés, Dorantes, Magellan (a Portuguese working for Spain) and Mendosa.
• Almost all of the streets in Parkmerced are named for members of the Anza expedition, including six women.^d
• And, as discussed above, the streets in St. Francis Wood were named after missions and ranchos which had been named after Spanish saints.

The Phillipines. Five small streets in the block between Third, Fourth, Folsom and Harrison Streets are named for heroes of the Phillipines' fight for independence from Spain. This is one of very few places in San Francisco where a neighborhood's distinctive street names actually reflect the people who live in it.

Colonial America. Colonists of the eastern United States were recognized in a subdivision named Colonial Park, north of Balboa Park in the Mission Terrace neighborhood, with street names including Pilgrim, Colonial, Nantucket and Raleigh. Standish Avenue, one block north, was replaced by the extension of Baden Street across I-280.

Soldiers. Many streets in the Presidio are, not surprisingly, named for its commanders and other military men. Three streets in the Bayview just east of Route 101 commemorate Napoleon and his battles at Marengo and Waterloo. Many of the Spaniards in the western neighborhoods were soldiers, though they're remembered more as explorers and settlers than for fighting wars, and some of the Anglo-Americans north of Market made their names in the military. But San Francisco's most martial neighborhood besides the Presidio is placid Bernal Heights. At least twelve of the north-south Streets on its south slope were originally named for generals in the American Revolution. Generals Moultrie, Gates, and Putnam are still there. Anderson, Ellsworth, Banks and Prentiss Streets were given those names in 1895 to honor combatants in the Union Army. Other generals were replaced by non-military names. Jarboe, Tompkins and Ogden Avenues were originally Jefferson, Union and Old Hickory (Andrew Jackson); all three names duplicated those of other streets and were changed in 1909. There are three more military names on Bernal's west side: Bennington Street, after the town in Vermont, site of a battle in the Revolution; Lundys Lane (missing its apostrophe), site of a battle in the War of 1812;^e and Winfield Street, named for General Winfield Scott (and originally named Chapultepec Street after a major battle in the Mexican-American War, won by Scott).^d

Academics. The north-south Streets on University Mound in the Portola District named for colleges and universities form another of the city's best-known themed neighborhoods. Ivy League students might recognize the east-west Streets apparently named for prominent educators. Timothy Dwight and Theodore Dwight Woolsey were presidents of Yale, Benjamin Silliman was Yale's first professor of science, and Cornelius Felton and Francis Wayland were presidents of Harvard and Brown. Albert Harkness was a professor of Greek at Brown and the author of widely used Greek and Latin textbooks. (Yale's Harkness College and Tower are named for a man born long after University Mound was laid out.) The namesakes of Burrows and Bacon Streets are unknown, though nationally known minister Leonard Bacon would fit in well with his fellow Yalies. (Loewenstein did not find namesakes for any of these streets except Felton, which he ascribed to '49er Charles Felton, who was not yet especially prominent when the streets were named around 1860.)

Artists and writers. Many local writers and other creative citizens are honored in the names of small streets, mostly north of Market, easily recognized by having their namesakes' full names. [cite] The main street on the west side of City College's Ocean campus was recently renamed to Frida Kahlo Way; her husband Diego Rivera, whose surname was already given to a street named for a Spanish settler, will finally be recognized in San Francisco's streets when Diego Lane is built as part of the Balboa Reservoir project.⁹ The Treasure Island development project is creating a new neighborhood full of streets named for artists: there are already streets named for the Bruton sisters, Ruth Cravath and Sargent Johnson, seven more that will commemorate other artists and architects who contributed to the Golden Gate International Exposition (Lulu Hawkins Braghetta, George Kelham, Donald Macky, Bernard Maybeck, Helen Phillips, Antonio Sotomayor and William Wurster), and one named for Sargent Johnson's centerpiece sculpture "Pacifica", a term also given to the exposition's architectural style.¹⁰

Activists. Many streets on Hunters Point Ridge are named for Black activists and community leaders, almost all local and most women: Ardath (Nichols) Court, Beatrice (Dunbar) Lane, Bertha (Freeman) Lane, (Marcalee) Cashmere Street, Cleo Rand Avenue, (Julia) Commer Court, (Ethel) Garlington Court, Espanola (Jackson) Street, Lillian (Wood) Street, Osceola (Washington) Lane, Reuel (Brady) Court, Rosie Lee (Williams) Lane, (Elouise) Westbrook Court, Whitney Young Circle and Willie B. Kennedy Drive. It seems quite possible that other nearby streets, planned around the same time and named with what appear to be given names and surnames, also commemorate prominent residents or nationally known Black leaders. The as-yet-unbuilt stretch of Donner Avenue between Arelious Walker Drive and (also as-yet-unbuilt) West Harney Way, part of a large plan for the site of Candlestick Park,¹¹ was named Charlie Way in 2021 for Charlie Walker, a Double Rock resident, activist and businessman.¹²

Given names. Streets with people's given names are all over the city, often thought to be developers' remembrances of their families. Men's or boys' names are less common, but Bruce, Edgar and Harold Avenues constitute a little boys' club where the Ingleside meets the Lakeview District. (Nearby Lee is a surname, named for a son of Robert E. Lee, a military officer in California.) The Bayshore Heights development, on the stub of Bayview Hill just north of Little Hollywood, is all-girl: Hester, Lois, Lauren, Megan and Mary Teresa. South of Market, several northeast-southwest mid-block streets have womens' names (Jessie, Minna, Clementina, Clara), mingled with Tehama and Natoma which are Native Californian. It is possible that these streets are named not for people or places but for ships given those names.¹³

Things

Plants. As mentioned above, the north-south Streets in Presidio Heights named for trees might have been named in imitation of a similar series of streets in Philadelphia. A few more floral Avenues are just to the south in Laurel Heights, between the southern extensions of Laurel and Spruce. The lushest botanical garden in city streets is the sixteen narrow, one-way, east-west Streets which bisect every block in Hayes Valley, the eastern Western Addition and Polk Gulch, from Rose in the south to Fern in the north. None of these areas show much appreciation for Californian species, which are scattered around the city.

The sea. The small streets off Kirkwood Avenue in the Mariners Village housing development, just outside the Hunters Point Naval Reservation, are named for ocean fish and other things in the ocean; the cleverly named Atoll Circle gives this group a Pacific flavor.^e A neighborhood on the west side of Treasure Island, between 9th and 13th Streets, has six small streets named for tasty fish. The private streets in the St. Francis Square cooperative housing development are named for ships (many themselves named for people). Seven are official city streets; more are shown on the co-op's own map.¹⁴

The land. The Westwood Park neighborhood, around Miramar Avenue north of Ocean, planned in 1917, named most of its streets to end with "wood". Just to the northwest, Monterey Heights, planned ten years later, continued the theme with five more "wood" streets. In the 1950s most of the Ways in Midtown Terrace, south and west of Twin Peaks, were given names promising a "view" (along with on-theme Aquavista Way and Panorama Drive). Diamond Heights, planned in 1969, played off the existing names of Diamond Street and Gold Mine Hill in naming almost all of its streets for precious stones. Ora Way, however, may nod to the Latin word for gold but is named for the wife of Mayor Edwin E. Robinson.

Notes

^a Cayuga Avenue was originally named Wyoming Avenue, then Winnipeg Avenue; both Wyoming and Cayuga are counties in New York State. Wyoming County's name is a Lenape word for "broad bottom lands". The state of Wyoming is named for Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, which was named with the same Lenape word.

^b H Street became Lincoln Way; that Hugo Street, adjacent to Irving, begins with H is a coincidence. Hugo might be named for author Victor Hugo (as Irving was named for Washington Irving) or for Hugo Sutro, brother of landowner Adolph Sutro, who donated the land for it to the city.¹⁵

^c The 1909 effort renamed streets so that no two had the same or very similar names, even disregarding their designation as "Street", "Avenue", etc. It also occasionally corrected spelling or changed a difficult name, and moved towards using "Avenue" only for larger streets. It left alone only the numeric duplication between east-side Streets and west-side Avenues, and the many streets in the Presidio (still controlled by the U.S. Army) which had the same names as streets in civilian San Francisco.

^d Only three people have two San Francisco streets named after them (leaving aside the many streets in the Presidio which duplicate streets elsewhere in the city, and streets named after places named after people): Juan Bautista de Anza, remembered by Anza Street in the Western Addition and Richmond District and Juan Bautista Circle in Parkmerced (streets there mostly being named after members of the de Anza expedition, Juan Bautista Circle must have been named after de Anza himself, rather than after the saint); Fernando Rivera y Moncada, after whom are named Rivera Street in the Parkside and Moncada Way in Ingleside Terraces; and General Winfield Scott, namesake of Scott Street in the Western Addition and Winfield Street in Bernal Heights.

Since the great renaming of 1909,^c two others have had that distinction but lost it when one of their streets was renamed: Mark Aldrich, a '49er with a checkered history, unaccountably had both Mark Lane in Union Square and Aldrich Alley south of Market named for him in 1909; the latter was renamed to Ambrose Bierce Street in 1988. Crusading missionary Donaldina Cameron was deservedly doubly honored from 2013, when her name was added to Old Chinatown Lane, until 2019, when Cameron Way was retired along with the rest of the Alice Griffith, a.k.a. Double Rock, housing project in the Bayview. It's possible that Hunters Point/Bayview activist Ardath Nichols was also for a time the namesake of two streets: Ardath Court on Hunters Point Ridge (named 1977) and Nichols Way in Alice Griffith Housing (named 1964, also retired 2019).

San Buenaventura Way in St. Francis Wood and its abbreviation Ventura Avenue in Forest Hill recall not the saint but the mission and city named for him. Adolph Sutro Court on Mount Sutro is named for the mayor, but Sutro Heights Avenue is named for his estate (which he named for himself) or for the hill and park named for the estate.

^e Lundys Lane, named for the Battle of Lundy's Lane in the War of 1812, is one of a handful of San Francisco streets whose designations of Street, Avenue, etc. contribute charmingly to their names. Others are Atoll Circle, The Feeney Way,¹⁶ Rose Pak's Way,¹⁷ Vernon Alley,¹⁸ and Vicki Mar Lane.¹⁷

References

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