Named after William Houstoun of Georgia, which is why New Yorkers say ‘HOW-stən’.
Houstoun was a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress in the mid-1780s and to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The street was christened by Nicholas Bayard, whose daughter Mary married Houstoun in 1788. It is not named after Sam Houston of Texas, who was an unknown teenager when ‘Houstoun’ appeared in the city’s records in 1808 and on the 1811 map.