One of a series of posts about Sunnyside streets and street names.
By Amy O’Hair
A street name can be an everyday mystery; even if you live or work near an odd one, it can become like part of the furniture—used but not noticed. The name of Congo Street in the Sunnyside district of San Francisco has been a mystery of sorts to many people I’ve heard from over the years. I knew a scooter messenger who had a habit of contemplating the city’s enigmas, and he used to find himself pleasantly puzzled when stopped at Congo on his way out Monterey Boulevard on a delivery.
Congo Street runs nine blocks, from Circular Avenue to Bosworth Street, from the edge of the I-280 freeway to the edge of Glen Canyon Park. It makes the ‘C’ in the short run of alphabetical street names, laid out in 1891, that begins with Acadia Street on the east and ends with Hamburg Street on the west (changed to Ridgewood Avenue in 1927).
Unlike the picturesque set of river-themed street names in a Sacramento suburb, where ‘Congo’ sits next to ‘Klamath’ and ‘Nile,’ Sunnyside’s Congo seems without meaningful context, being next to streets named Detroit and Baden. How it came to be the choice of the Sunnyside Land Company is the story of idealized capitalist aspirations that would soon meet the realities of imperialist atrocities against indigenous peoples in the heart of Africa. There was nothing arbitrary about their choice.
In the two decades following the naming of the street in Sunnyside, the Congo in Africa was the site of a genocide of staggering proportions. Many people have told the story; this article highlights only some of it, including a few heroes of humanitarian reform of the time who should be better known, as well as an African American poet who evoked the Congo throughout his long working life.
And the Congo has resonance in the immediate present: the recent efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement in Belgium may finally knock the villain responsible for the atrocities, King Leopold II, off his plinth. Better a century too late than never.
