Only in San Francisco does Front Street front — nothing. And First Street misses actually being the Financial District’s first street by a half-dozen blocks.

San Francisco’s thousands of alleys, streets and byzantine culs-de-sac archive the city’s history in their names. They chronicle a waterfront that has since been expanded with landfill and immortalize the Gold Rush prostitutes, criminals, politicians and military commanders that carved San Francisco out of sand dunes. There’s a street named for the first mayor and the first commander of the Presidio.

But few thoroughfares have been...

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