After a seven-month debate over what to rename Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, the SF Rec and Parks Commission on Thursday bestowed the new name Blue Heron Lake.  

District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar started making noise last spring about renaming Golden Gate Park’s Stow Lake, because its namesake, Gold Rush-era state Assembly Speaker William W. Stow, had a notorious history of antisemitism. The full SF Board of Supervisors agreed, and approved a name change in mid-May. That set off seven months of pondering what the new name would be, with the SF Rec and Parks Commission having the final call.  

And on Thursday, they made that call. The Chronicle reports SF Rec and Parks Commission decided the new name would be Blue Heron Lake.

If you’re not familiar, the Blue Herons are actually Great Blue Herons, and they’ve been nesting at the lake since at least 1993. According to a Richmond Review profile from last spring (which has some awesome wildlife photos), the herons nest in two trees at the lake; one near the Stow Lake Boathouse, and the other near the lake’s waterfall.

“Herons are charismatic birds; their courtship rituals are elaborate and beautiful,” Richmond Review said. “The chicks closely resemble little dinosaurs with their punk mohawks.”

Per the Chronicle, “The rename will also affect the boathouse at the lake and the road encircling it.” That refers to the Stow Lake Boathouse and the street Stow Lake Drive.

As for William Stow, history has not looked back kindly on some of his statements on the state Assembly floor. “I have no sympathy with the Jews and would it were in my power to enforce a regulation that would eliminate them from not only our county but from the entire state,” Stow reportedly once said in a speech. “I am for a Jew tax that is so high that [Jews] would not be able to operate any more shops. They are a class of people here only to make money and who leave the country as soon as they make money.”

Ironically, in 1889 Stow was appointed to the San Francisco Park Commission, now called the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Commission, which is the very body that stripped his name off the lake today.

Related: New Names Being Floated for the Renaming of Stow Lake [SFist]

Image: Daderot via Wikimedia Commons

A years-long campaign to change the name of Stow Lake, named for a man with an ugly legacy of antisemitism, has resulted in a short list of ten suggested new names for the 130-year-old man-made lake.

Last year, the law school formerly known as UC Hastings was renamed UC Law San Francisco, a name change brought on by a reckoning with its 19th Century founder Serranus Hastings’s history of Native American genocide and enslavement. And nationally, we’ve seen a couple other renamings of the Washington, D.C. NFL team and Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team as those franchises eventually bowed to sentiment that their previous names seemed kind of racist.  

Next up for a name change may be Golden Gate Park’s Stow Lake. The 130-year-old man-made lake is named for the man who largely raised the money to complete it in 1893, former state Assembly Speaker William W. Stow. The SF Board of Supervisors passed a resolution in  May urging Rec and Parks to change the name of Stow Lake, because of Stow’s history of antisemitism. And today the Chronicle reports that Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s office has produced a short list of ten proposed new names for Stow Lake that would not be tainted by Stow’s legacy of bigotry.

Was William W. Stow too antisemitic to have a prominent landmark named for him? Consider an 1855 speech he gave on the Assembly floor, dug up by the Jewish News of Northern California.

“I have no sympathy with the Jews and would it were in my power to enforce a regulation that would eliminate them from not only our county but from the entire state,” Stow reportedly said. “I am for a Jew tax that is so high that (Jews) would not be able to operate any more shops. They are a class of people here only to make money and who leave the country as soon as they make money.”

Seems bad! So some of the proposed new names are historical figures one would feel better honoring: Underground Railroad figure and legacy SF resident Mary Ellen Pleasant, who’s considered to be the first Black woman millionaire, 20th Century Chinese diplomat Ho Feng Shan known as the “Chinese Schindler” for saving thousands of Jews during the Holocaust by discreetly issuing them visas, William Hammond Hall and Patrick Quigley who helped design the park, and others.  

There’s also a category of suggestions that are nods to the wildlife and environment there:  Blue Heron Lake, Turtle Lake, and Strawberry Lake, a nod to the lake’s Strawberry Island.

The full list of ten proposed names, seen below, is not final. Melgar’s office is still taking suggestions, and the final call goes to the SF Rec and Parks Commission, who may not even decide to change the name. (Ironically, William W. Stow once sat on that very commission.) The commission is expected to consider the matter early next year.

The current ten proposed new names for Stow Lake are as follows:

• Blue Heron Lake or Heron Lake

• Joan Davenny Lake

• Dr. Ho Feng Shan Lake

• Lake Hall (for William Hammond Hall)

• Mikveh Lake

• Mary Ellen Pleasant Lake or Pleasant Lake

• Patrick Quigley Lake

• Ramaytush Ohlone Lake

• Strawberry Lake

• Turtle Lake

Related: UC Hastings to Be Renamed the Rather Awkward 'College of the Law San Francisco' [SFist]

Image: SF 3/21/19 - Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park (Getty Images)

All eyes will be on a block of MacArthur Boulevard north of Lake Merritt, as the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to rename a block of that street “Tupac Shakur Way.”

Things change, and that's the way it is, particularly on the 400 block of MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland. Some California love is being given to the late rapper and actor Tupac Shakur, as the Chronicle reports the Oakland City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to rename a block of MacArthur Boulevard as “Tupac Shakur Way.”

According to KQED, the resolution they passed states that “MacArthur Boulevard between Grand Avenue and Van Buren Avenue where [Shakur] once lived serves to remind us of his contributions to Oakland and our communities through the celebration of art and culture as an awakening tool towards changes in society.”

The renamed area is not exactly where Shakur had lived, but it’s only about a block away. The map above shows the portion of MacArthur Boulevard that’s getting the honorary renaming, it’s just north of Lake Merritt, and it's the portion between Grand Avenue and Van Buren Avenue (where the words “MacArthur Blvd” appear in the image above.) Shakur had actually lived at 275 MacArthur Boulevard for a period in the 1990s, which is about a block to the north of the renamed area.

And while Shakur was a native of Baltimore, he did move to Marin City, attended Mount Tamalpais High, and also lived briefly in Santa Rosa. He gained fame during his Oakland phase when performing with the act Digital Underground, and then as a solo artist in 1991. In addition to selling more than  75 million records worldwide, Shakur also appeared as an actor in the films Juice and Poetic Justice.  

As a funny aside, then-Vice President Dan Quayle called for Shakur’s album 2pacalypse Now to be banned in 1992, alleging the record was somehow responsible for the fatal shooting of a Texas trooper.

No timeline has been announced for installation of the street signs.

Related: Too $hort Movie Shooting In Oakland, But Businesses Blow the Whistle Over Disruption, Lack of Notice [SFist]

Image: CHICAGO - MARCH 1994: Rapper Tupac Shakur poses for photos backstage after his performance at the Regal Theater in Chicago, Illinois in March 1994. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)

Wayne Pickering (AKA, Brian McConnell), head of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco formed to honor George W. Bush -- which, at the risk of boasting, SFist was the first to tell you about back in March -- just contacted SFist to let us know that commission's ordinance initiative to changing the name of the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility to the "George W Bush Sewage Plant" will, in fact, be on the November ballot. More details to come. Stay tuned.

Pickering was worried yesterday that they might not qualify since there was a spot check of 500 of their signatures. But that's normal since the process works like this: the power that be test 500 random signatures against the voter files. Based on said raw count, if no more than 143 of the 500 signatures (28%) are thrown out, you automatically qualify for the ballot. And: ta-da! Also, according to Wayne, "we turned in 11,999 signatures, of which 11,041 were counted in the official raw count. We need 7,168 signatures from SF voters to qualify, so we went in with over 50% more than we needed."

Congrats, craz poop plant renaming people! For the full press release, follow the jump.