TITLE: Naming the Streets.
SOURCE: Weekly Alta California, 24 December 1851, page 2.
TRANSCRIBER: SFgenealogy.
NOTES: None.

Naming the Streets

There is undoubtedly very little “in a name,” since any one now-a-days having the hardihood to cavil at a name is sure to be snapped up with a pertinacious What's in it? and more than this, it is a fact which is rendered indisputable by the evidence of many of the most learned men of the day that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet;” providing always that it is a “red red rose,” for we have no confidence in the odors of these recent French inventions of blue and yellow roses. We should as soon, indeed, be tempted to endure a dish of white crow, because it was named pigeon, as suffer our olfactories to be titillated into a silly acknowledgement of one rose's fragrance in a whole bed of sky-blue or “yellow roses.” But with names in general, be they misnomers or “onkimmon” names, such as Brown, Jones, or, even, Smith, the usages of society do not admit of a shade of value, more or less attaching to them, and grant no distinction. Were we to deliberately commence assorting and selecting names, and declaring this to be patrician and that plebeian, we very soon would have made an alarming inroad upon the Higgins', the Wiggins', and Muggins' of American aristocracy, and numbered some of its proudest houses with the snobs and clods whom they affect to consider vulgar people. No, no, for the sake of peace in the family let us create no inviduous distinctions in names. Let us salute the whole world with a smiling

“Good day Sir Richard, God 'a mercy fellow!
And if his name be John we'll call him Peter.”

But there are names that when applied to things mean just no-thing, and occupy the place of names, or nouns that are both common and proper, and of this class are some of our street names, if any one will take the trouble to look at a map of the city survey, he will discover that a large proportion of the streets distant from the business centre of the city, bear the names of individuals who have never been known either to “fortune or fame” in a public way and whose only pretensions to the right of handing their names down through a succession of sign boards to the middle of posterity, was based upon their speculative operations in Town Lots in the region of the locality designated by their address, or perhaps by a squatter claim to one hundred and sixty acres in city blocks and squares. Now we have objected to this system before, aud we again protest against it, and we cannot understand why the City Surveyor, in his drafts of the city, should be governed by the whims, vanities and impudence of a parcel of lot owners, and affix their names to streets and avenues not designated by the residents in the vicinity, or by any other reasonable and just authority. We have Jones street, and Smith street, and Clark street, and Brown street, and Buckelew street, and Leavenworth street, and a host of other streets, whose appellations by the easier style of Bob, Tom, Jim, Dick and Harry streets, would be quite as proper aa the existing names, and be infinitely more popular than some of them.

There is an abundance of respectable material for street naming belonging to the various sections and localities of this city, which should be brought into use, before the names now engrafted, borrow from their use among men that which very many of them never couldd have obtained in any other way — strength and popularity. Our streets should bear the names of prominent men and objects, and preserve the original character of the locality or district which they pass or traverse, as nearly as possible, that in future, when all “old landmarks,” scenes, and incidents, shall have passed away from the sight and familiar greeting, their names shall cause them to live again in the mind's eye, and leap into memory with all their pleasant associations to warm the heart and beguile the fancy.