When Behrend Joost laid out Sunnyside's 2,250 lots in 1891, he named the streets for the men who put up the money. Joost Avenue he kept for himself, the longest one. Spreckels, Wieland, Mangels, Flood: brewery heirs and mining fortunes, mostly German-born like Joost, their capital converted into signage. As the Sunnyside History Project documented, several of these investors never set foot on their namesake streets.
The city began replacing them in three waves. In 1895, duplicate-name confusion took Moulton, swapped for the recently deceased mining senator George Hearst. In 1909, after the earthquake, Spreckels, Wieland, and Milton gave way to Staples, Judson, and Marston. As O'Hair observed, "just putting up capital in real estate speculation was not sufficient virtue to have a street named or renamed for you." The replacements honored a 49er insurance executive, a chemist whose explosives built the railroads, and possibly a Marine captain from the Mexican-American War. Then in 1920, Sunnyside Avenue itself became Monterey Boulevard, and in 1927, Hamburg Street became Ridgewood. Both renames came under pressure from developers of the wealthier residential parks to the west, who, as the Sunnyside History Project notes, "did not wish their pretty work to be tainted by the working-class Sunnyside brand."
Six streets kept their 1891 names: Flood, Mangels, Joost, Edna, Baden, Foerster. Walk them now and you are walking on the names of investors whose money Joost needed in 1891, preserved because no other San Francisco street had claimed the same word.
Sunnyside's renamed streets
- 1895 · Moulton → Hearst · Two other Moultons in SF forced the change
- 1909 · Spreckels → Staples · Duplicate in Visitacion Valley; Gus Spreckels had already called in Joost's $50,000 loan
- 1909 · Wieland → Judson · Duplicate in Visitacion Valley; the brewery heir's "gleam" had faded, per the History Project
- 1909 · Milton → Marston · Three Miltons citywide; no one has identified the original Milton
- 1920 · Sunnyside Ave → Monterey Blvd · Westwood Park and St. Francis Wood developers petitioned the change
- 1927 · Hamburg → Ridgewood · Not WWI anti-German sentiment, O'Hair notes — too many years had passed
Sources: Sunnyside History Project (O'Hair, 2018); FoundSF (Proctor, drawing on Thomas Malim's 1976 research)