A Trip Down Market Street

A Trip Down Market Street is a 13minute actuality film recorded by placing a movie camera on the front of a cable car as it travels down San Franciscos Market Street. A virtual time capsule from over 100 years ago, the film shows many details of daily life in a major American city, including the transportation, fashions and architecture of the era. The film begins at 8th Street and continues eastward to the cable car turntable, at The Embarcadero, in front of the San Francisco Ferry Building. It was produced by the four Miles brothers Harry, Herbert, Earle and Joe. Harry J. Miles cranked the Bell amp Howell camera during the filming. The film is notable for capturing San Francisco shortly before the citys devastating earthquake and fire, which started on the morning of Thursday, April 18, 1906.

The film records a total of thirty cable cars, four horse cars and four streetcars. At first there also appear to be many automobiles however, a careful tracking shows that almost all of the autos circle the camera many timesone of them ten times. This traffic was apparently staged by the producer to give Market Street the appearance of a prosperous modern boulevard with many automobiles. In fact, in 1905 the automobile was still something of a novelty in San Francisco, with horsedrawn buggies, carts, vans, and wagons being the common private and business vehicles. The near total lack of traffic control along Market Street emphasizes the newness of the automobile.The film was originally thought to have been made in September or October 1905, based on the angles of shadows showing the suns position. Film historian David Kiehn noticed that there were puddles of water seen in the street, and after he examined contemporary newspapers and weather reports, he realized that the early estimates were wrong no rain had fallen in those months. Kiehn located the February 1906 registration record for a car license plate recorded in the film, and he found that the suns angle would be the same in March as it had been in September. In 2009 Kiehn suggested that A Trip Down Market Street was filmed in late March or early April 1906, a period with many rainy days reported. He found an advertisement for the film published in the New York Clipper on April 28, 1906, which stated that the film had been shot just one week before the complete destruction of every building shown in the picture, though this was a somewhat hyperbolic claim given that a number of buildings seen in the film were heavily damaged and later repaired. If the one week statement was correct then the film would have been shot on April 11. Kiehn also found a San Francisco newspaper article published on March 29, 1906, describing the Miles Brothers intent to film aboard a cable car. In October 2010, Kiehn

Source: Wikipedia