SOMA Side Streets Named After Ladies

Historical Essay

by LisaRuth Elliott, 2020

Detail of 100 Vara Survey area of San Francisco (later called South of Market), on the 1854 H.F. Bridgens map.

This exploration of streets supposedly being named for women focuses on a small geographic area in San Francisco—SOMA—and a short period of time at the founding of this new urban center in the mid-19th century.

San Francisco Ladies?

"You know those streets, the back alleys, named for ladies downtown San Francisco and in SOMA? You know they were named for prostitutes, madams maybe even, during the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast days, right?!” (Wink, wink, nod, nod)

If you've ever wondered about the origin of SOMA alleys with the first names of women, you've probably heard this fancy myth, which is even part of the marketing for at least one bar along one of these streets today. There are also theories that pioneer families named them after their daughters. But, the reality is that there are very few streets named after females in San Francisco from any time period; most early streets were named after powerful men who made their mark in some way. So this is a story not only about where the street names for Jessie, Annie, Minna, Clementina, as well as their sisters Tehama and Natoma, came from, but also about the naming of things.

I find it hard to believe a street would have been named for a woman in the 1850s, and especially not for women who were likely to be transient, like sex workers. Even women who didn’t occupy the lowest rung of the ladder in terms of employment—the madams—also were mostly moving through. At the least there would be a Briones Street for Juana Briones, the most likely candidate of a woman to revere at the midpoint of the 1800s. And where are the surviving legends of the ladies to accompany the streets named for them? None have survived, if there were any. A book from 1912 says the alley names have no meaning at all.

Local historian Angus MacFarlane went on a complicated 21st century quest to prove that Haight and Waller were named after prominent women of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as of course these women were married to even more prominent men with the same last names. He even had written documentation in history books to contend with, almost proving the names came from these ladies’ husbands. Even so, the streets reflect the husbands’ last names, not the given names of the women they honor.

So let’s say side streets named for the first names of women didn’t come from early ladies of the night. But what DID—and DO—people name after their female family members?

Boats! Ships!

Let’s say it is possible that these street names in SOMA might be named instead for ships. Many of the streets (alleys) in question lie on the north-south routes that would have been taken from Yerba Buena to Steamboat Point on Mission Bay along 2nd and 3rd Streets. They were also some of the first streets created in the area surveyed in 1847 and then known as the 100 Vara Survey. From Rincon Point to Steamboat Point, early SOMA was the location of the shipbuilding, shipbreaking, and steamboat reassembling industry in the mid-19th century.

But which ships would be selected? Were these streets named for early ship arrivals?

The streets we're talking about are: Annie, Jessie, Minna, Clementina, and there are Tehama, Natoma as well. There are a few that did not survive 1970s Redevelopment, and have been only preserved on very old maps, like Alice, Louise, Jane, Elizabeth, Luconia. And mixed in we have streets of a similar size like Stevenson, Shipley, Anthony, Ecker, Hubbard, Haywood, Abbott, Schultness, Mellus…not likely women’s names at all. It may also be possible that Jessie Street is not a woman’s name. Several men with the first name of Jessie appear, however, in important posts as early as 1850, but there is some notion that the street was named for Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of John Charles Frémont.

Searching the newspapers from the early 1850s for these names yielded some interesting information about boats that would support my theory, especially since William Eddy was laying out San Francisco's newly developing areas in 1851.