Place names are a critical part of the meaning making process, and provide information about the inhabitants of the city and their values. Official street renaming is a means of legitimizing sovereignty and reinforcing authority (Azaryahu, 1996&2011) through dominating urban space and creating a collective memory by municipalities (Oto-Peralis, 2018). It is one manifestation of the reconfiguring of both space and history (Duncan, 2004). For this study, I view street names in Mashhad, Iran, as ‘memorial arenas’ that indicate the existence of multiple layers of stories that appeal to memory, both by their visibility on street signs and by their invisibility as former names. My work especially focuses on two aspects of street naming: 1) How referring to street names is a matter of everyday practice for local residents; 2) How street names indicate hegemonic space appropriation by the Mashhad Municipality as an administrative arm of the post-1979 governance that omits, adds and substitutes street signs. I use data from my Summer 2018 participant observation in Mashhad and interviews with local residents, who consciously or subconsciously defy these hegemonic street signs. Using the concept of ‘spatial practices and constructed order’ by De Certeau (1984), I explore the multiplicity of local accounts about the streets of Mashhad, as opposed to the one prevalent official construction that is reproduced through official addresses, maps, phone book listings, and of course the street signs themselves. For instance, local residents of the now-named Imam Khomeini street still call this street as Adl and as Adl-e Pahlavi: originally named Adl-e Pahlavi (meaning Pahlavi Justice), it was officially renamed to Adl-e Khomeini after 1979. Noticing people skip Khomeini’s name, the municipality omitted the word Adl and renamed the street as Imam Khomeini in the 1990s, all of which became a matter of ridicule for local residents. I argue that in the urban context where the street signs carry official names as the accepted framework, the additional accounts insert themselves to challenge the hegemony of the constructed order of these names. The result is the local stories, satirical accounts circulated on social media, lists of original street names on websites, pedestrians who call the streets by their former names as a sign of local-ness, and extensive discussions generated among taxi passengers who comment on street names. I analyze these stories as special practices of everyday life that prevent the official version of history being rendered as natural.