SF Alley Owners Auction Naming Rights, Top Bid Reaches $120K

The 83-foot strip of pavement off Kirkham Street in the Outer Sunset, a former carriage path that spent most of its history without an official name, attracted a $120,000 top bid this week in a naming rights auction. The prospective buyer wanted to call it "BAGS STREET."

The owners who ran the auction, Riley Walz, 23, Patrick Hultquist, and Theo Bleier, opened the bidding online on April 2, offering the winning bidder a permanent street sign and a Google Maps listing update. The same week, the trio launched a public art contest inviting anyone to submit a 48-by-48-pixel drawing to be printed on the alley's surface, with a voting deadline of April 7.

How this group came to control a piece of the Outer Sunset is, by now, a well-traveled San Francisco story. The alley, labeled "Dirt Alley" on Google Maps but holding no official city street name, was listed in a May 2025 tax-defaulted property auction run by the San Francisco treasurer's office. Composer JJ Hollingsworth, 69, and her husband Alemayehu Mergia, who lived next door on 24th Avenue, believed they were bidding on the two-unit building across the alley at 1926 Kirkham Street, a property that had sold for roughly $1 million the year prior. Their sealed bid of $25,000 won. They told the building's tenants they were the new landlords. Then the transfer tax check came back uncashed, and a closer look at the parcel map made clear they had purchased the 7-foot-wide alley, not the house.

After months of efforts to rescind the sale with help from Sunset Supervisor Alan Wong, Hollingsworth sold the alley in February 2026 to Walz, Hultquist, and Bleier for $26,000. The three had previously organized Pursuit, a 12-clue citywide scavenger hunt that drew 12,000 participants across San Francisco last summer. Walz, who works at OpenAI, also built Find My Parking Cops, an app tracking SFMTA enforcement vehicles that the agency shut down within a day of its launch.

The new owners spent $10,000 to pave the alley and set about reimagining it as both a public art installation and, now, a commercial naming opportunity.

The auction raises a harder question about who actually gets to rename a piece of San Francisco. As a privately held parcel, the alley's owners can legally post any sign they choose on their own property. But adding a street name to the city's official address system requires Board of Supervisors action, a process the auction does not initiate or guarantee. A Google Maps update, meanwhile, is subject to Google's own address verification standards rather than the outcome of a private bid. Whether "BAGS STREET" appears in navigation apps or city records after the auction closes depends entirely on processes that a $120,000 offer does not automatically unlock.

The alley has changed hands three times in under a year. Whether its name follows suit is a different transaction entirely.