HomeMy brother sent a link to this historical footage, writing, "Things like this fascinate me." Me too. It's Market Street in San Francisco as filmed from the front of a streetcar a few days before the 1906 earthquake. (The four-points button under the "You" in YouTube at the bottom of the video will display it full-screen.)
Traffic is willy-nilly -- horse-drawn wagons and open automobiles, bicycles and pedestrians all cross paths at random angles, scurrying over cobblestones and tracks, often just ahead of an oncoming streetcar. A newspaper seller works the strip between the parallel sets of tracks in the center of the wide street. Knots of people wait for streetcars at trackside in the cars' part of the road, forcing oncoming autos to hang a left onto the tracks.
Text on the video's Flixxy page notes that,
This film, originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record, even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!).. It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by train to NY for processing.
Film historian William M. Drew writes (California's first narrative film),
"A Trip Down Market Street," shot in April of 1906 with the camera mounted on a trolley car, used one continuous take in a full reel of film to provide a vivid depiction of San Francisco's bustling thoroughfare. Historian David Kiehn, who identified the film as a Miles Brothers production, also discovered through his research that Harry Miles put his technical ingenuity to good effect by equipping the camera with a thousand foot magazine capable of shooting the entire journey down the long street without need of reloading......on April 18, 1906, just four days after the brothers had shot their Market Street film, the studio, along with all its plans and even photographs of the building, went up in flames during the cataclysm that devastated the entire city. Despite their own terrible loss, the Miles Brothers were on the spot, racing across San Francisco and the Bay Area to chronicle the dramatic events with their movie cameras for a film that played around the nation, bringing widespread recognition to the brothers for their heroic endeavors and their skill as documentarians.
The music behind the silent footage is "La Femme D'Argent" from the Moon Safari album by Air which that Amazon page describes as "a superlatively happy collection of experimental disco-mood sound nestled between ambient soundscape and breathy pop."
