Many of the streets in the city of San Francisco have standard, typical names including Broadway and 3rd Street – nothing to talk about there. But then there are the ones that most people cannot figure out at all such as Divisadero and Geary. What are they about? Now, thanks to a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews BBC Fellow (Noah Veltman), there is an interactive map that gives information on the history of the city’s streets and parks. He himself describes it as a “window into the layers of San Francisco history.” Included in this map is: the mission era, gold rush, railroad tycoons.
To create the map he used an open-source supply of world map data – Open Street Map. But what he had to find other sources for was the historical side, especially ensuring it was 100% reliable. He did this by putting in a lot of manual work such as delving into old archives, school books, etc.