For a city of only 49 square miles, San Francisco is packed with a lot of neighborhoods. While Wikipedia puts the number at 40, locals would tell you there are at least a dozen more, from Lincoln Park to Balboa Terrace to Bayview Heights.
Many of these enclaves have curious names. Cow Hollow? Did cows live there?
A deep dive into the stories behind their monikers provides interesting insight into some of the city's earliest residents and its wild and woolly past. Indeed, the ribbon of land squeezed between Pacific Heights and the Marina was once home to 38 dairy farm. That's a lot of cows.
1. Noe
Valley
This sunny
enclave on the city's south side is named after Jose de Jesus Noe, who was
given a large stretch of land by the Mexican governor of California in 1846.
Noe started selling parcels in 1851. His rancho included what's now today Noe
Valley, the Castro and Glen Park.
Pictured:
24th Street in Noe Valley is busy with neighborhood shoppers and pedestrians on
Monday, April 13, 2015.
2. Tenderloin
There are
many urban legends explaining the name behind this downtown area that has long
been riddled by crime and frequented by drug dealers and prostitutes. One story
goes that police officers assigned to this area in the 1930s were paid more and
they named the neighborhood after the finer cuts of meat they could afford. Another
explanation is that it's the "soft underbelly" (like the cut of meat)
of the city. And many sources indicate the name was taken from a former
red-light district in New York.
Pictured:
Kids walk past the new Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco, California, on
Tuesday, July 14, 2015.
3. Richmond
District
The city's
foggy northwest corner was supposedly named by one of its earliest residents,
the Australian art dealer George Turner Marsh who thought the rolling sand
dunes resembled those of a Melbourne suburb called Richmond. He called his own
home the Richmond House and the name was adopted throughout the neighborhood.
The city tried to officially name the area "Park-Presidio" in 1917 to
avoid confusion with the East Bay city of Richmond, but it never stuck.
Pictured:
Balboa Theatre, 1964
4. Bernal
Heights
This enclave
and its eponymous hill are named after one of the city's great land owners.
Jose Cornelio Bernal was a member of the Anza expedition, and in 1839 the
Mexican government granted him a massive swath of land that covered one-quarter
of San Francisco's present area. What's now the neighborhood of Bernal Heights
was just a small plot of the Rancho Rincon de las Salinas y Potrero Viejo. The
rancho was subdivided and sold in the 1860s, and Irish immigrants took over
many of the plots, turning them into vegetable and dairy farms.
Pictured:
Streetcar Track Construction on Cortland Avenue West from Winfield Street |
October 11, 1909
5.
The Castro
Both the neighborhood and the street were named after a
military commander during the Mexican-American War (many street names honor
these officials). Jose Antonio Castro was governor of ‘Alta California’ and
commander of the Mexican army during the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt. In 1840, he
caused the 'Graham Affair,' an 'international diplomatic incident' that
involved arresting roughly 100 foreigners living in California and transporting
them to San Blas (near La Paz in Baja California).
6.
Cow Hollow
Yes, cows once roamed what's now the boutique-lined Union
Street. This ritzy neighborhood tucked between Russian Hill and the Marina
District gets its name from the dairy farms located in the neighborhood. The
industry peaked in 1880 when 38 farms were helping feed the growing city.
Pictured: Union Street, Between Steiner Street & Pierce
Street, November 15, 1906.
7. Dogpatch
The 10
blocks stretching west from the intersection of Third and 22nd Streets were
called Butchertown after the hood's booming slaughterhouse industry. The new
name was adopted in the 1960s and comes from the hungry wild dogs who used to
beg for scraps outside the doors of the abattoirs.
Pictured:
Shops are seen is seen in the dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco on October
16, 2015.
8. Duboce
Triangle
The park,
the avenue and the neighborhood are all named after Victor D. Duboce, another
Spanish-American War leader. He was the commander of the First California
Volunteers and, after the war, was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
During the war, he also surveyed the Philippines and created a map of its
terrain, according to Hoodline.
9. The
Embarcadero
Embarcadero
is derived from the Spanish verb embarcar, which means 'to embark,' and
embarcadero means 'the place to embark.' This reference is fitting because
before the construction of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in the 1930s, the
waterfront along San Francisco Bay was a bustling port with boats ferrying
50,000 people to town each day.
Pictured:
The sculpture, "Cupid's Span," along the Embarcadero with the Bay
Bridge in the background, on Friday August 19, 2011 in San Francisco
10. Haight-Ashbury
Fanning out
from Golden Gate Park, this neighborhood known as the origin of hippie culture
gets its hyphenated name from two early S.F. leaders. Gold Rush-era exchange
banker Henry Haight and S.F. Supervisor Munroe Ashbury were instrumental in the
creation of Golden Gate Park. They both have streets named after them and these
famously intersect in the heart of the hood.
Pictured:
Sharon Sweeney, Larrry Sweeney and Beth Barton tape a Love sign with the
Haight-Ashbury street sign. Likely the 150 Anniversary.
11. Hayes
Valley
This enclave
of historic Victorians and trendy boutiques, located between Alamo Square and
Civic Center, is named after Thomas Hayes. He was a county clerk from 1853 to
1856 and owned land in the Western Addition. Hayes opened the first Market
Street Railway franchise after forming a business alliance for its creation.
The line connected the main part of S.F., at Market Street and Third, to the
three-mile-away Mission settlement, with the line ending at 16th and Valencia.
It was the first railway on the Pacific Coast, according to the Market Street
Railway.
Pictured:
The only known photo of the Market Street railroad train taken around 1860 at
Market and Third streets.
12. NoPa
NoPa is
short for North of the Panhandle, a long and narrow grassy median that forms a
panhandle with Golden Gate Park. The neighborhood west of Divisadero borders
the Western Addition and has been referred to as the area North of the
Panhandle for over 100 years. A newspaper clip from 1912 includes a report from
the "North of the Panhandle Improvement Club." The trendier
abbreviated name was introduced in the 1990s by the North of the Panhandle
Neighborhood Association, according to Hoodline.
Pictured:
NoPa is one of the most popular restaurants in the neighborhood.
13. Western
Addition
San
Francisco’s seventh mayor, James Van Ness, authored an ordinance that created
the Western Addition in 1855. The large swatch of land expanded the city’s
boundary west from Larkin Street to include 500 blocks. It was mostly
small-scale farming (a lot of milk ranches) until the invention of the cable
car in the 1870s, when it became a Victorian streetcar suburb. It went through
a significant transformation after the 1906 fire, when many people moved to the
area that was spared by the fires that ravaged downtown and SOMA. Today, the
area mostly refers to the eastern portion (the Fillmore District) of the
original neighborhood.
Pictured:
Houses being cleared in the Western Addition on July 9, 1959.
14. Potrero
Hill
This sunny
residential neighborhood known for its skyline views used to be an open hill of
shrub and grass. In the late 1700s, Spanish missionaries named the area ‘Potrero
Nuevo’ (which translates to 'new pasture') after the land they would let their
cattle graze in the area. As the Dogpatch started to become industrialized in
the mid-1850s, many workers started living in the Potrero Hill area. The name
changed after the Mexican-American War, when “Yerba Buena” became “San
Francisco” and the second mayor of SF, Dr. John Townsend, oversaw the
development of the neighborhood at the same time the Gold Rush started to pick
up. He worked with a team including the property owner, town surveyor Jasper
O’Farrell and Captain John Sutter to turn the neighborhood, which wasn’t even
formally within the city limits, into a grid. Since many say Potrero Nuevo as
an intersection of Mexican California and the US before California became the
state (largely due to its location), the team named north-south streets after
American states and east-west streets after California counties. There’s
speculation Townsend only used states he had been to.
Pictured:
Vermont Street on Potrero Hill, which is more crooked than Lombard's famous
twisty bit.
15. Russian
Hill
Throughout
the 19th century, Russian merchant and military ships made stops in San
Francisco and and there are references in old newspaper articles to crew
members being buried in a cemetery at the top of what's now known as Russian
Hill. In the Gold Rush era, settlers discovered the cemetery gravestones
inscribed in Cyrillic. The graves were eventually removed but the name stuck.
Pictured:
Anchor Brewery Russian Hill, 1871
16. SoMa
“South of
Market” is pretty straightforward and refers to the area south of Market
Street, one of the city's main thoroughfares. More intriguing is the
neighborhood’s former name “South of the Slot.” Slot refers to the iron cable
car track on Market Street. It was a marker of two different worlds and, as
described by Jack London, “South of the Slot was home to working class as well
as slums, factories and boiler works. Above the slot were theaters, hotels,
banks and the shopping district. The 1906 fire destroyed the Market Street
cables.
17. Union
Square
This public
plaza and the surrounding shopping area was one the site of rallies in support
of the Union Army during the American Civil War. The city's first mayor, John
Geary, built and named the plaza.
Pictured:
Union Square, as seen from Geary Boulevard and Stockton Street, in 1919.
18. Divisadero
Street
This main
thoroughfare is suspected to be named after Lone Mountain (the hill that's
currently home to USF). Lone Mountain's Spanish name was El Divisadero. Some
people (presumably individuals who aren't native Spanish speakers?) claim the
hill was named for dividing San Francisco from the Presidio, but others claim
the Spanish comes from the verb 'divisar,' which translates to descry and
references being able to see far from the vista.
19. Yerba
Buena Island
This tiny
island, best known for its tunnel connecting the western and eastern spans of
the Bay Bridge, has a name that is very important to San Francisco’s history.
Back when our city was a tiny hamlet under Spanish and Mexican rule, located in
the heart of today's Financial District, it was called Yerba Buena. It became
San Francisco in 1847 after the Mexican-American War. 'Hierba buena' is Spanish
for 'good herb' and encompasses a variety of aromatic plants. (The pictured
illustration ran in the Chronicle in 1932 and shows a previously proposed
airport on Yerba Buena.)
Article and images sourced from http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/San-Francisco-neighborhood-names-history-stories-6866181.php#photo-4572174
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