This is cool. Obviously the sound track was added later.
That was cool. Thanks.
Two things struck me. 1) not too many women on the streets, and 2) pedestrians are all over the place. No crosswalks, etc.
Also, streets are a lot less congested than these days.
Yes very cool. I’m a bit surprised that a filming would not get more attention. But suspect that it was done very discreetly. I would think that the camera was at the very least on a tripod and people would be more curious.
The added sound track is well done.
What’s amazing to me is the difference the speed correction makes. The funny sped-up look of most movies we see from this period, shot between 16 and 20 fps (hand-cranked, usually) but projected at 24 fps, is so familiar, but so unnatural, that we have a hard time relating to the subjects as real people. They are unintentionally comic, and not quite human.
But just slow down the playback to its proper speed, and all of a sudden these are real people, this is real life, not some alien world, and we are there. Astounding!
I can’t believe how well-dressed everyone looks. You can tell who is wearing second-hand clothes, but the vast majority of it would have been hand-tailored to fit, and what a difference!
Every one of those people had worries and stressors we can’t even imagine.And every one of them at that moment wondered how they’d get through it all. It’s a great perspective to look at them now, not performing or dramatizing, but just going about their day, taking a moment to gawk at a film crew. And to know that they’re all gone, and the only thing left of them is their genes in a great-grandchild. Maybe one of those people did something creative that is still decorating a wall somewhere.
I get the same sort of feeling from looking at old photos of civil war soldiers. I always wonder which of them made it home, and who they are hoping to see again. And just, the knowledge of how very important it all was to them at the time is somehow comforting.
If you like that, you might like this; a film of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco. The film was shot just four days before the earthquake (and subsequent fires) in 1906 that destroyed most of the city.
Ah, a time when men would wear a suit to eat dinner at home, and opening a hat store was a totally viable business…
Ah, 1911! The year my grandfather jumped ship in NYC and became an illegal alien from Austria-Hungary! Those were the days! :o
Look at all that horse dung in the streets. No wonder there were polio epidemics every summer.
Actually looks a lot like how I remember Chicago around 1959. So much of that is gone now, forever. 
What a great clip. My thoughts:
Everyone in the clip has died.
All of the jobs that are now obsolete.
Loved the young kid that kept looking into the camera
Loved the family being driven around by their black driver. Not one of them looks happy except for the driver! I wonder what their relationship with their driver was.
The hard-working horses. Since they were their owner’s livelihood, I assume they were treated well. But probably not all of them.
The clothing was great. I didn’t see anyone in Crocs and pajama pants!!
Straw boaters were obviously all the rage in 1911!
Exactly my reaction, but stated much more eloquently than I would have.
The San Francisco footage was very likely shot for a Hale’s Tours show. Hale’s tours was an early “virtual ride”, where the patrons sat in a theater that was built to resemble a railroad or trolley car, and which could be shaken about like a real car rolling on a track, with things moving rapidly by the “windows” and even smoke and bells going off, while a projector showed the film on a screen in the front to give the audience a feeling of being moving down a railroad or trolley track, or a street. All that was missing (since sounds were being supplied) was color, and for al I know they may have hand-tinted some of these.
the shows were immensely popular for a few years, until theater owners realized that other suppliers were available, and they didn’t have to pay the franchise fee. Or that they could just show regular movies. But the Hales Tours got a lot of famous Hollywood people their first interest in or jobs in the movies.
Everyone is remarkably thin, too. No TV to veg out in front of, no sitting in traffic jams for hours at a time, no tons of junk food to binge on.
I was going to comment on the black chauffeur too, but was afraid my remarks might be misconstrued. He sure does look happy, and I doubt it was just because he knew he was being photographed. The white family, on the other hand, looks very uptight. I wonder what their story was. *Nouveau *riches, maybe?
Watching the clip, I was also reminded of this story:
In the case of Bridget Driscoll, a footnote in that link, “The jury returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ after an inquest lasting some six hours. The coroner, Percy Morrison, (Croydon division of Surrey) said he hoped ‘such a thing would never happen again.’”
We all know how *that *worked out.
All the men are wearing straw hats, and many women are wearing white, which means it’s summer. And while some guys are going without jackets or vests (probably lower class laborers), the vast majority of them are wearing coats which are most likely wool. Everyone is wearing long sleeves. It looks like there was a breeze that day, at least.
Aw, shucks!
A podcast I listen to, The Dollop, had a really interesting and entertaining episode about this era, #193 - “When the Cars Came”. It’s a fascinating bit of forgotten history.
As the podcast tells it, before there were cars, people were used to just stepping into the street and walking wherever they wanted. The fastest thing in the street was a horse, and you could hear them coming a long way off. But, once people started buying cars, there was a mighty struggle between the factions of, “The streets are for cars!” and, “The streets are for pedestrians!” It was also something of a class war, because car owners were mostly rich folks.
Also, it was extremely normal for kids to play in the street (having parks for kids to play in wasn’t a thing yet). That, coupled with the facts that there were few traffic laws, signals, or road markings, next to no enforcement, and wildly untrained drivers (if you got any training at all, it was from the guy who sold you the car), meant that people (and kids specifically) were getting run over in unheard-of numbers. The PR move that turned the tide will surprise you.
Really, give it a listen, it’s a heck of a story.
Apart from a certain amount of horse dung, the city was remarkably clean. Apart from the man on the boat with a pipe, I think I saw maybe only one person smoking. No one eating or drinking, either. At least a couple of the women clearly seem heavily corseted.
The New York Sanitation Department was formed in 1881 and reformed in 1894, and by all accounts made a huge difference in keeping the streets clean. There’s just something about the quasi religious zeal of the turn of the century reformers that created efficient organizations. In addition, I would imagine that the areas filmed were important ones, which would be cleaned even more diligently.
That’s awesome. Reminded me of my favorite game, Bioshock Infinite. It’s kind of a shame that everybody dresses like slobs now. I’d love to take a visit.
I’m fairly confident that horse dung is not a vector of polio.