30 April 2013
Noah Veltman, a Knight-Mozilla News Fellow at the BBC, has created an interactive map that displays the origin of place names (mostly street names) in San Francisco. It’s well-designed and easy to use.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy, which is notoriously difficult to achieve with toponymic etymologies, but if the account in this KQED article is correct, it’s probably as accurate as can be: “Reliability was an issue, he said. He tried to cross-check all his facts, because often one source would tell one story and another source would tell it slightly differently. ‘It’s a lot of just manual legwork,” Veltman said. “Looking at old archives, school books, old newspaper articles from The Chronicle, checking out historical society pages. There were certainly no shortcuts.’”
[Tip o’ the Hat to Mic Michelsen]
