I was browsing YouTube videos the other night when this came up in my feed: footage down Market Street filmed by a camera mounted to a trolley car. The person who posted it took the old footage and remastered it to sharpen, add image stabilization, increase frame rate, and also added color and sound.
It’s made clear in the posted description that the color and sound is added only for the ambiance, not historically accurate, but it’s very well done and really makes it feel like you have a magical viewfinder to look and listen back almost exactly 112 years into the past. It really brings 1906 Market Street alive.
It’s so well done that I half-suspected that I was being whooshed, that it’s actually a video clip from a much more recent movie or something. But as amazing a job as the remaster is, there are little glitches and artifacts that show through, like the wagon wheels on the horse-drawn carts not turning realistically due to the FPS increase; they sort of ‘stutter’ back and forth in a 20 degree or so arc.
Couple random observations:
Wow, what a free-for-all early Market Street was-- horse-drawn carriages, horseless carriages, trolley cars, bicyclists and pedestrians all going every which way and nearly colliding several times. Fortunately everything is low-speed enough that there probably weren’t too many casualties.
The (purported, at least) date of the footage makes it all the more poignant and historically valuable: seeing all those people going about their business, some waving to the camera, with no idea of what would befall them in just 4 days. The anniversary of the earthquake was just 3 days ago. I want to do some research now and see if I can find out just how much of what can be seen in the video was damaged in the earthquake; for example the tower that can be seen at the end of Market street that is part of the main trolley depot (a plaque when you get to the end of the video shows it was built just 10 years before, in 1896). I imagine that tower was probably destroyed.
The guy who remastered that video has several others, but this looks like by far the oldest.
The tower with the clock? That’s the Ferry Building - still standing and wiki says it took little damage in the quake. Am I looking at the wrong tower? FYI, the same building can be seen in the same YouTuber’s San Francisco 1920’s video at 57s.
Aside: I love the colorized and speed-corrected videos on YouTube. There are some of Paris that could be impressionist paintings come to life! The ambient sound added to them enhances the time-travel illusion.
Fun fact: Someone (the Library of Congress I think) analyzed the license plates on the cars in the original film, and found that the same couple of cars just keep driving past the camera over and over. The filmmaker wanted to make it look like San Francisco was a very prosperous city, so he had a few drivers drive past the camera, then circle back and drive past the camera again, and repeat, to create the illusion that there were a lot more cars on the road than there actually were.
If you want to see the street-scape the way it is today, google maps, street view is a good place - go to the intersection of Market St and Main St and look down the street toward the Ferry Bldg (sorry, I do not know how to share the image you can see from street view).
Someone also made a new video in 2006, 100 years after the original film, traveling up the same section of Market Street. I’m sure it’s on YouTube somewhere; I’ll see if I can find it later when I have more time, unless someone beats me to it.
Thanks for fixing the typo in the title, @What_Exit! I didn’t notice it until after the editing window was expired. It was a bit embarrassing but I didn’t feel like it was worth bothering a mod over.
I’ve long been fascinated by this footage, but nobody seems to talk about WHY it was shot. Who the hell needs a movie shot from the front of a cable car going down a street?
I strongly believe that this was one of the films made for Hale’s Tours. Ther are actually a lot of similar films shot from the front of railroad trains, trolley cars, and the like. This is jjust the most famous of them, largely because of its coincident association with the San Francisco earthquake.
Hale’s tours were the invention of George Consider Hale, a retired fire chief who also produced the “Fighting the Flames” live-action firefighter show for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and which became de rigeur for amusement parks in subsequent years.
Similarly, his “Hale’s Tours” became widely franchised, then essentially stolen. They were said to have given a lot of movie people their start in the business.
It was essentially a “virtual reality” ride. In its full-blown form, the “theater” was built to resemble the interior of a Pullman car, and could be shaken and moved. Fans moved the air inside and smoke might be introduced, while personnel made train noises around the car. The big selling point was the front wall, which was really a motion picture screen upon which was projected a film shot from the front of a train or similar moving item. If you ignored the fact that it was in black and white, you had a perfect experience of being in a moving train car, much the same was Disney’s Star Tours ride gives you the feel of being on a moving spaceship shuttle. (and I’ll bet some places used hand-colored films to get around that, too.)
Hale’s innovation wasn’t THAT original – there were similar “Phantom Rides” (as they called them then) that gave you the experience of being in a submarine, or even a trip to the moon. But Hale’s was the first to actually use a motion picture screen that I’m aware of.
