After driving down Market Street and almost running over a bicyclist, a pedestrian, and a few animals, I find myself wondering if I’m in an intersection or merging onto a one-way street in the wrong direction. I anxiously slam on the brakes and realize the person I almost killed is flipping me off instead of smeared across my windshield; I take a deep breath and look around.

Every time I’m here, I get stopped on Kearny Street, and when I notice Irving Street later I want to shoot myself because it took me thirty minutes to drive ten blocks. Once the car is parked and I can finally take in the city away from the driver’s seat, I grow more and more curious about the names of our corners, streets, and venues.

Like most San Franciscans, I peer into the dark, narrow alleyways of downtown San Francisco and am surprised to find that doors line the walls, and secret neighborhoods are calmly settled between the large streets surrounding them. Thick, black MUNI-wire zigzags create the ceiling of our city, and while looking up I feel even smaller—as if I’m in some sort of metropolitan maze. I always wonder what the names of these intricate streets mean, or whom they represent.

The first time I read Kearny Street, I remembered one of me history classes. The street was named after Major General Watts Kearny, whose token phrase was: “the Chinese must go.” Compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Caesar Chavez, this man does not seem like street-sign material, but there it is—a sign guiding thousands through the city—and it represents a famous general who happened to be racist. There are the obvious names, such as Embarcadero, which means “the place where the boats leave,” but others have more interesting histories behind them.

De Haro Street is named after Francisco de Haro, who bought Rancho de la Merced, a huge part of the city, for a meager ten cows and twenty-five dollars in 1837. Colin P. Kelly Jr. Street is named after a World War II pilot whose plane successfully bombed a major Japanese cruiser shortly after Pearl Harbor. Japanese aircraft almost immediately hit the plane and Kelly is famous for staying at the controls long enough for his crew to bail out before it exploded, killing him. Balboa Street is named for Vasco Nunez Balboa, who is credited with discovering the Pacific Ocean.

Even a mapmaker’s assistant, J.P. Bush, who aided Jasper O’Farrell in making the first San Francisco map, has his name emblazoned on a city street sign. The Sunset district has a name deserving of its location—when the fog doesn’t blur the horizon, the blue sky sits on top of the crisp salt water directly to the west of the neighborhood, and as the sun sets vibrant reds, yellows, pinks, and oranges illuminate the sky over the homes.

According to street lore, The Sunset has its named because often the sun peaks through the fog for just long enough to set. And so the entrepreneurs, mayors, doctors, lawyers, governors, and army men of our past linger on most San Francisco street corners. Their stories are fascinating, but what’s important is noticing their existence. With a little research, residents can find that not only are their respective streets named after the wealthy and successful, but also after the poor and heroic, and they’ll learn a lot about the roots of their city in the process.