Many thanks for providing a link to your wonderful photograph from the Hotel Union Square. It’s a very evocative shot – and it’s great to see the Maltese Falcon statue featured in the picture!

Drew Bourn

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markcoggins/2763390106/in/set-72157612363523388

Thank you for your responses. I think your comments point to a key consideration: for anyone who is motivated to retain or revise place names, what are the stakes involved? In other words, what is the perceived value in retaining or changing particular place names? The question of what kind of historical memory might be evoked or erased by any such retention or change is, I believe, a useful one to entertain – particularly in conjunction with questions about how anyone learns or uses site-specific history, whether well or poorly.

Thank you for your kind comments, and also for drawing attention to your discussion of similar place-naming issues in Berlin. I especially enjoyed your discussion of place-naming issues associated with the I-Hotel and Kearny Street here in San Francisco – including the challenges for the Kearny Street Workshop of having been displaced from the I-Hotel and seeking other sites in San Francisco while retaining a sense of connection to their origins on Kearny Street.

Given your interest in street renaming (odonymy), you might be interested in my posts on these topics between Berlin and San Francisco:
http://clairelight.typepad.com/atlast/2006/06/berlin_odonymy.html
http://clairelight.typepad.com/atlast/2006/05/new_yorck.html

Thank you for your question. According to the website of the event organizer, the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry, Company G, a date has not yet been set for their January 2012 re-enactment. You might wish to check back on their website for updates, or contact them directly:

http://users.lmi.net/mcm20me/20th_Maine/CompG/20thMECOG.htm

Alternately, you might wish to contact the Ranger Station at Fort Point:

http://www.nps.gov/fopo/contacts.htm

Good luck!

Drew Bourn

Thank you for your contribution! Yes, the battles over street names in the southern part of The City are another great example. In the dissertation I’d recently finished, I had argued that San Francisco in the nineteenth century secularized in certain ways before similar changes took place in other parts of the U.S. In light of that, it’s interesting to see the claims made by O’Sullivan to the effect that South San Francisco was fundamentally Christian; it was a rhetorical move that appears not to have paid off.

Drew