120 Years Ago, I Lived on Sierra Street

The East­ern por­tion of the Mis­sion Dis­trict and Potrero Hill all the way to the Bay are some­times lumped togeth­er as «the state streets» because many of the North to South streets are named for States in the Union.

What’s not as com­mon­ly known is that when these streets were first laid down, the East to West streets were all named for Cal­i­for­nia coun­ties. I heard a tour guide refer to this when a walk­ing tour came through my neigh­bor­hood and became curious.

After a cou­ple hours with Google, I found no ref­er­ence to the date when the streets were renamed (as exten­sions to the num­bered streets South of Mar­ket; if it ever seemed strange that the num­bered streets don’t line up with them­selves on oppo­site sides of Har­ri­son Street or Potrero Avenue, you now know why: the num­bered streets orig­i­nal­ly end­ed at Potrero or Har­ri­son) but I did find a San Fran­cis­co His­tor­i­cal site that has archived maps, includ­ing one from 1873 with the names of Cal­i­for­nia coun­ties instead of num­bered streets through Potrero Hill.

It took a lit­tle bit of doing, as the dis­tance between streets is not exact­ly uni­form in this part of the City, but I think I’ve got a pret­ty good han­dle on which streets became what num­bers. I used a few dif­fer­ent maps, plus checked where the num­bered streets end­ed at Har­ri­son or Potrero as a guide for the most log­i­cal con­tin­u­a­tion. None of the maps I looked at were per­fect, but I am con­fi­dent in my conclusion.

The coun­ty streets were South of Mis­sion Creek, where Divi­sion Street now is, and North of India Basin. North­ern­most to South­ern­most with the cor­re­spond­ing mod­ern name, the names were:

• Alame­da Street is still Alame­da Street
• El Dora­do Street now 15^th Street
• Cen­tre (not a coun­ty) Street is now 16^th Street
• San­ta Clara Street is now 17^th Street
• Mari­posa Street is still Mari­posa Street
• Solano Street is now 18^th Street
• Butte Street is now 19^th Street
• Napa Street is now 20^th Street
• Sier­ra Street is now 22^nd Street. If you fol­low 22^nd Street West from the Bay, Potrero Hill gets in the way and the road curves North and becomes Texas Street. Almost imme­di­ate­ly after this turn is a one-block-long street that is still named Sierra.
• Neva­da Street is now 23^rd Street
• Sono­ma Street is now 24^th Street
• Yolo Street is now 25^th Street
• Yuba Street is now 26^th Street
• Colusa Street is now Cesar Chavez Street, was Armey and then Army before Cesar Chavez.
• Marin Street is still Marin Street
• Amador Street is still Amador Street

Calav­eras Street, Men­do­ci­no Street, a street whose name was not leg­i­ble on the 1873 map, and Fres­no Street do not exist at all any more.

On today’s map there are also Hum­boldt and Madera Streets. I don’t know when they were built or named, but they don’t appear on the 1873 map.

By the time of the earth­quake, the streets already had num­bers out here.