Coolest Video Ever: Extra, Extra: See San Francisco Before the Big One Struck!
Posted by Michael Walsh Apr 11th 2010 at 8:58 am in History |
Coolest video ever:
This is San Francisco on April 14, 1906, the city of William Randolph Hearst and the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Morning Call, the Daily Evening Bulletin, of Jack London and Frank Norris, of the Palace Hotel, of men in bowler hats and three-piece suits, of streetcars, cable cars, horse-drawn wagons, bicycles, of newsboys in caps and great department stores lining Market Street and there — at the very end the road, the Embarcadero and Ferry Building.
Urban Traffic
by Cookie the Dog's Owner on April 09, 2010
This video has been making the rounds of late. It's Market Street in San Francisco on April 14, 1906, four days before the great 1906 Earthquake.
[Video below]
carlustblog.com
The camera was set up on the front platform of a cable car, and aimed out the end windows to record the scene as the cable car trundled down the street at a stately 5 MPH or so toward the Embarcadero. My comments after the jump.
Apart from the undeniable time-machine coolness of watching a 104-year old movie, there are a few things that strike me about this film.
• First is the sheer anarchy of traffic. There are no lane stripes, no stoplights or stop signs, no crosswalks. Other than a tacit agreement that everyone keeps to the right side of the road, there don't seem to be any rules at all. In just the first minute, we see a horse-drawn bus and an electric streetcar plowing through cross-traffic on Market (0:20 and 0:26, respectively) and autos making aggressive U-turns right in front of the cable car (0:24 and 0:33). So many pedestrians are ambling across the street between vehicles that I lost count. There's a police officer who crosses the tracks just in front of us at 0:39, and he doesn't seem to be too concerned with writing any traffic tickets.
• Even the convention of what side of the road to drive on is less than strictly observed. We have a freight wagon on the "wrong" side of the street at 0:16, and an automobile at 3:30.
• Notice, too, that some automobiles have the steering wheel on the right, and others on the left. That particular design issue wasn't fully sorted out for a couple more decades. The last right-hand drive autos built in the U.S. were made by Stutz in 1921.
• Notice how much horse-drawn traffic there is, especially horse-drawn freight traffic. There's even a man on a white horse (on the "wrong" side of the street) at 4:10. Those who would curse the modern automobile as a source of pollution should perhaps consider how much pollution the gasoline engine got rid of--all of the "exhaust" those horses must have generated, and how much effort it took to clean it off the streets . . . and your shoes . . . and the carpet in the lobby or the front hallway where you tracked it in.
• What's the story with the two guys chasing the automobile starting at 4:52 or so? They grab on and sort of run with it, dodging along in and out of traffic until the car makes a left turn from the right lane; you see them let go about 5:31. Did they know the driver, or was it just a random prank by a couple of teenagers with nothing better to do? Do they have any connection to the snappily dressed newsboy who gets on the tracks at about 5:05 and seems to dare the cable car to catch him? You could get a dozen short stories out of that forty seconds or so of film.
• At 5:51, you'll notice an electric streetcar track which crosses the cable-car route from the left and then runs parallel in the "lane" to our right. Starting at this point on Market Street, there are two transit companies operating competing services on two different sets of tracks. By 1918, there were four tracks down the full length of Market Street, and during rush hour trolleys ran nose-to-tail on all four. The "roar of the four," as they called it, lasted until 1947.
Quite apart from its subject matter, this sequence has particular historical significance as the first film made in 35mm format. It was originally thought to be from 1905. The correct date was recently determined by historian David Kiehn of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, from clues such as old weather records and theater listings, the length and direction of shadows (from which you can determine the position of the sun in the sky, and the time of day), and the license plates on passing cars. Mr. Kiehn even ran the plate numbers and has the owner's name for all the cars.
I don't know early automobiles well enough to tell you
what particular makes and models we see in the film, but these are pre-Model T rides. In that day and age, the price of a Packard was about equal to the price of an average house, and even more pedestrian makes like Winton or Buick or Olds were priced out of the reach of many. The drivers we see are most likely members of the upper income brackets. It is amazing to consider that the most humble, unadorned, base-model hatchback you see today sells new for a fraction of the price (in inflation-adjusted terms) of that Packard, and has capabilities and features that 1906 Packard's owner could not conceive of.
One cannot help but wonder if, say, 104 years from now, the readers of Car Lust will look on our crude Hafner-era videoclips of streets filled with Camrys and Civics with the same sense of amazement that this film stirs in us today.
--Cookie the Dog's Owner
bigjournalism.com
The Ferry Building survived; much else did not. But a new and even more beautiful city rose from the ashes.
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