Where do street names come from? Sometimes there’s actual history behind a name, and other times a street just needed a label, so someone pretty much pulled one out of a hat. For the former, there can be some interesting stories at work. Web developer and Knight-Mozilla fellow Noah Veltman mapped the history of street names in San Francisco under this premise. Just click on a blue street in the interactive and information pops up.
History of San Francisco street names mapped
Neat! I’ve shared with some colleagues in San Francisco.
Thanks for sharing-
Danielle
It should be a simple matter to attach information to a GIS street layer once the research has been done. The book Streetwise Chicago gives the history of each street in Chicago. The biggest problem would be copyright issues; otherwise you could just OCR scan the book and join the history data by street name to the Chicago streets database. See: http://www.amazon.com/Streetwise-Chicago-History-Street-Names/dp/0829405968/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1367424609&sr=8-2&keywords=streetwise+chicago