On July 27, the corner of Connecticut and 20th Street on Potrero Hill was officially designated "Art Agnos Way," honoring the former mayor who arrived in San Francisco by Greyhound in 1966, was shot two blocks away in 1973, and went on to lead the city through the Loma Prieta earthquake and the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway.

On July 27, at midday, Art Agnos yanked a strand of twine at the corner of Connecticut and 20th Street — just outside Loard's Ice Cream on Potrero Hill — and a small silver sign went up reading "Art Agnos Way." Agnos is 87. He has lived on these blocks for decades. He was also nearly killed here.

He arrived in the city on Labor Day weekend in 1966, stepping off a Greyhound bus as the son of a shoeshine man. His father, Christ "Christy" Agnos, a Greek immigrant, had run a storefront in Springfield, Massachusetts — selling cigars, blocking men's hats, shining shoes. Art worked beside him until Christy died of cancer in 1955, when Art was 16; he kept on shining shoes alone, his mother taking over the hats. "I couldn't date certain girls in high school because my father shined shoes for a living and cleaned hats," Agnos told the gathered crowd, as reported by Mission Local's Joe Eskenazi. "I never got over that. Springfield was a good city, a nice city to grow up in. But I came here to look for a better life. Our family did not belong to the right class: I could never have been mayor of Springfield."

In San Francisco, he said, nobody asked where he went to school. (Bates College undergrad; Florida State for a master's in social work.) Ten years after the Greyhound, he was in the state legislature. Eleven years after that, he was mayor. Thirty-nine years after that — July 27, in fact — his name went up on the sign.

The sign sits a few blocks from where, on December 13, 1973, Agnos was shot. He was finishing a community meeting near Wisconsin and 23rd streets, then working as a field representative for Assemblyman Leo McCarthy, when he heard what he thought were firecrackers. The women around him scattered. "I started chasing them to calm them down and reassure them that no one was going to hurt them," Agnos recounted in a TV news interview shortly after the incident, per Mission Local. "At that point they told me the man was trying to kill me." The killers, responsible for the murders of at least 15 San Franciscans per Mission Local's account, had aimed low; had the gun been level, the bullets would have struck his heart. Agnos was, he later said, the only victim from those attacks not permanently disabled. Asked by a TV interviewer whether the shooting would keep him off the streets, he answered: "Not at all. Not at all." His son, speaking at the ceremony, put it this way: "The same fight that sustains my dad is the fight necessary to sustain San Francisco."

The street-naming legislation was carried by Potrero's home supervisor, Shamann Walton. Former Board President Aaron Peskin served as master of ceremonies. Rep. Nancy Pelosi was there; Mayor Daniel Lurie was there. Former Mayor Willie Brown RSVPed and did not appear. "Willie Brown is late, as usual," Agnos told the crowd, which laughed knowingly, per Mission Local.

Agnos credited the hill itself with what followed. "They oriented me, exposed me to so much, taught me so much about this city," he said of Potrero Hill's residents, per Mission Local. "I was propelled by them into public service. When I got married, they celebrated with me. When I got shot, they looked out for me." His mayoral record includes steering the city through the weeks after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the decision — politically damaging at the time, largely vindicated since — to demolish the Embarcadero Freeway and reopen the waterfront.

The surrounding blocks are mid-motion. Permit 202607084724, issued July 8 at 228 Connecticut Street two blocks south, carries an estimated $55,000 alteration; Potrero Hill has logged 6 eviction notices in the last 90 days and 257 311 service requests in the last seven days, per DataSF. The new sign is the smallest thing on the corner.