That Which We Call a Street by Any Other Nameby John Frando | ||
Kaphan Avenue used to be Glen Road, and Fair was shortened from Fairview. Street sign photos by John Frando.
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As a teenager, Quentin (Lon Rand) would ask himself why streets have the names they do. The now-retired Oakland Public Library reference librarian has written (unpublished) books about the streets in Del Norte, Marin, and northern Alameda counties. "It dovetails with my lifelong interest in family history," he noted. "It's a little like working a jigsaw puzzle, putting the information together bit by bit."
In the Alameda County Recorders Office, Quentin reviewed, on microfiche, hundreds of sometimes century-old tract maps. They were created and recorded whenever large land parcels or tracts were surveyed and subdivided into smaller house lots in neighborhoods where many residents live today. The maps showed new streets, blocks, and property boundaries for individual house lots. The painstaking work of looking at every tract map in northern Alameda County for the names of streets and landowners took over a year. The Laurel District area alone is comprised of 65 tract maps.
Armed with the names of the landowners, Quentin searched birth and marriage certificates, public documents, archived newspaper stories, and books for connections between landowners and the street names found on the maps. He discovered that landowners named streets in honor of themselves, family members, friends, or individuals locally or nationally famous at the time. Lincoln Ave. now extends from MacArthur Blvd. to the Warren Freeway near the Mormon Temple. It was named after a son in the Dimond landowning Rhoda family, who lived on MacArthur Blvd. (back then, Hopkins St.), and not directly after the nation's sixteenth president. Names came from other sources too, like states, counties, trees, and flowers. Street names were changed to memorialize important events or to eliminate duplicate city street names. Former street names often appeared in parentheses on subsequent amended tract maps.'
Quentin organized years of research into long indexes that serve as important historical resources. Betty Marvin, a city planner with the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey, which evaluates the architectural character of buildings and districts in Oakland, relies on his list of tract names. Dorothy Lazard, his former colleague at the Oakland Library, said: "Just recently I used Quentin's street-name book to settle a dispute between neighbors in the Dimond over the origin of the name Lyman Road."
Quentin's manuscripts are available at the Oakland History Room of the Main Library. He expanded his book on northern Alameda County street names to include San Leandro streets and plans to publish it soon.' He continued, "One street that continues to perplex me is Kiwanis Street. I don't think there was ever a Kiwanis Club building on the street. But perhaps the tract owner, attorney Martin Ruter Green, belonged to that organization. He was the manager of Central California Realty Investment Co., circa 1930. Also, he had a son, Martin P. H. Green, born 1909. Undoubtedly the son has passed on, so I can't question him. I wonder if there were grandchildren."
Quentin encourages anyone with additional information to contact him by email at buffalobile\@yahoo.com.