A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire

Just a few days before a ruinous earthquake struck a great city, the Miles Brothers Film Company mounted a movie camera on a cable car that proceeded to travel along the center of a commercial and busy Market Street towards the Ferry Terminal Building (14 April 1906). The result is a twelve-minute documentary of visual delight.

While many Western towns were slowly transforming from the days of cowboys (like gravel streets with wooden sidewalks), San Francisco had already made the change to a modern city. Some streets were paved, and there were the underground gas mains. Horses and wagons now share the road with the new automobiles, which weave in and out of slower moving traffic any way they can. Crossing the street was at one's own peril. Pedestrians cut in front of all kinds of moving traffic, and horses and wagons pull out in front of trolleys. It is amazing that there were no accidents on this film. This scene is before the days of traffic signals and police directing traffic at the main corners.

Note that auto steering wheels are mounted on the right. Some trolley cars are electrified (they cross Market Street) while others are still being pulled by horses (along Market Street), as was the case in the previous century. Bicycles can be seen. Everyone wears hats (except young people towards the end of the film), and formal wear predominates.

Some other observations:

• Around 6:00 and again at the 7:45 mark, see individual pedestrians on the right side nearly struck by automobiles. • Just before the 7:00 mark, two automobiles nearly collide. • At 9:43, as a trolley approaches from the opposite side towards the viewer, auto on left (driving wrong way) veers to the right to avoid a crash with that trolley. • At 10:08, a woman enters the rear of a trolley from the middle of the street.

All of this activity was followed by the earthquake and fire on 18 April 1906. See the companion piece to this film (San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, April 18, 1906). A sobering thought: One wonders just how many of those folks on camera would be dead within a few days, as Market Street and environs were hit hard. Three thousand of the city's population did die, about a quarter of a million were left homeless, and 28,000 buildings were destroyed.

This short documentary has been shot weeks before the terrible quake! And after it, others shot the same path: you can find on the web edit movies with the 2 frames side by side to compare before / after the quake! they say they are synchronized but i doubt it: street lamps are after the quake! What is striking is that we barely see the Ferry building on the end of the street: dust, fog or bad quality, i can't say? Also after the quake, there is much more people outside on the street... But this trip movie has a lot of legends: shot 6 days before, Frisco was full of cars while i understand it was much earlier and in fact there is much less cars that it seems because the cars keep circling around the camera. At last, it's pity: i started my coast to cast american trip here but i don't think i did this travel because my cable car was in a downhill road while here it's completely flat...

The movie is twelve minutes long and it's made by the Miles Brothers, a pioneer film company that made some thirty movies between 1903 - 1907.

This movie is their best known, and for good: it's a little gem. They installed their camera on a cable car that operated on Market Street, the Fifth Avenue of San Francisco (or their Champs Élysées, if you prefer). And so, set on the car, the camera filmed the view of the street, as they were slowly going down to the Ferry Building.

Watching this movie is like traveling on a time capsule that brings us in a jiffy over hundred years ago. The impression is incredible, we fall under a charm. It is the Market Street in San Francisco, everything is there in place, something doesn't fit. There is much less traffic, but it's so chaotic! Cable cars coming from the other side, buggies, carts with their horses, some kind of trolley buses crossing the street every now and then, cars, bicycles, and above all pedestrians, circulating in all directions, crossing the street just in front of the vehicles, running in front of the street car having the camera and shaking their hands with a big smile, just to be caught in the movie, to remain on the screen for eternity. It's a formidable impression of chaos, of joy, of nice irresponsibility, it's La Belle Époque American style. Or rather it's the beginning of big urban life, that particular moment when people just enjoy the novelties: the big city, the industrialization, the cars, the filming. This moment can actually take a couple of years, then the reality becomes the king. But that moment is wonderful. It's a moment of enthusiasm, it is superbly caught by this movie. Watching it calls in mind the mastership of Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Camera. The movie of the Miles Brothers is a lesson of sociology.

The movie was long considered to have been made in September 1905. Actually it was made in the spring of 2006, just days before the big earthquake and fire that hit San Francisco, and many of the enthusiast people appearing in the movie would die very soon after the filming.

It happened that the movie was sent by train to New York in the night before the earthquake. The following day the studio of Miles Brothers was destroyed by the cataclysm.

And the name this movie remained known as A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire.

San Francisco, A Trip Down Market Street is one of the most magical films you'll ever see.

I'd argue, even more magical than the magnificent Melies.

The whole thing is quite simple really.

It's just a camera, located at the front of a cable car, as it travels down Market Street to the clocktower on the Harbour Building of the Embarcadero.

What makes it such a magical experience, is that it shows us how film can act as a time capsule.

Offering us a glimpse into the past of San Francisco in 1907...4 days before the city would be decimated by, what is arguably, the most infamous earthquake in American history.

The San Francisco of Mark Twain...Adolph Sutro...and Lily Hitchcock Coit.

Not to mention countless hundreds of other not so famous city dwellers of the time.

Before Benny Bufano, Diego Rivera and Herb Cain.

I watched the "upscaled" version re-mastered by Dennis Shiryaev.

He utilized a number of neural network algorithms to sharpen up the image, add a slight bit of colour, and even some sound effects...which really help to bring this bygone era spring to life, as it were only yesterday.

The cobblestone streets, shared by pedestrians, cyclists, horse drawn buggies, early motor cars, and cable cars alike.

Lined with long lost buildings, bustling shops, a legion of newsboys, and people going from here to there.

Men sporting their suits and ties, with grand mustaches and bowler hats; and women in their majestic dresses.

As they wander amongst carriages and buildings adorned with mural sized advertisements for beer, shops, hotels and cigars.

The filmmaker would, again, film this same journey...only 4 days later...to show a rather different scene.

Gone were the buldings, bustling shops, and large scale advertisements.

The people were still there.

But now they were wandering amidst rubble, and half standing structures...as if an atomic bomb had hit and left them in a post apocalyptic wasteland.

Leaving you to wonder, what became all those folks who stopped to stare at the spectacle of this wondrous new mechanism- the film camera- in action?

Did that boy, who spent the entire second half of the film running in front of the camera, up until the car stopped upon the turntable where Market Street meets the Embarcadero, survive to wander these same streets, in their decimated form?

Or grow up to become an actor, or filmmaker himself?

Perhaps the film can't answer all these questions.

But what a privilege it is, for us, to experience this world over 115 years later.

Mindlowing, even.

Props to Shiryaev for his masterful restoration of the film.

As it really helps to bring the film to life, and immerse you in that world.

Would make for an excellent VR experience, I'd think, too...in this newfound form.

Because it already seems to have that effect when I sit and watch it upon my TV in my room.

Lest we forget, that with the magic of cinema...time travel really is possible!

And that, this is, without question, the most important film ever shot on the streets of San Francisco, that we still have today.

10 out of 10.

From the front of a cable car, a motion picture camera records a trip down Market Street, San Francisco, California, from a point between 8th & 9th Streets, Eastward to the cable car turnaround at the Ferry Building.

Maybe it was cheating, but I watched this with sound superimposed on top of the picture. It made it more entertaining, to be sure. But regardless, this is an incredible film. We know some of it was staged, but it still shows a busy city street in 1906. The clothes, the horses, the beards... this is a priceless document of history.

Apparently there is some debate on exactly when the film was made, but it does seem to be not long before the earthquake. Maybe a week, maybe more. But the exact date does not change the fact it captured San Francisco in its prime.