A Trip Down Market Street , San Francisco 1906

It's April 14th 1906 , hop aboard a cable car and enjoy the sights of San Francisco in 1906 , a time when roads were just a means to an end and how you got to where you were going didn't really matter.

New Version of footage San Francisco 1906, A Trip Down Market Street, Shot on April 14, 1906, four days before the San Francisco earthquake and fire. 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,

Video Restoration Process:
✔ FPS boosted to 60 frames per second
✔ Image resolution boosted up to HD
✔ Improved video sharpness and brightness
✔ Colorized only for the ambiance (not historically accurate)
✔added sound design only for the ambiance
✔restoration

stabilisation,denoise,cleand,deblur)

Please, be aware that colorization colors are not real and fake, colorization was made only for the ambiance and do not represent real historical data.

Very cool. I had been to that area various times with visiting family and friends. I think I will share this with them. It is neat to be able to compare and contrast then and now.

Ah, the old Ferry Building, still there of course. Take off and landing place for all the traffic across the Bay to the East Bay of Oakland and all points East.

I noticed a couple of guys here and there sweeping up the horse poop. No jaywalking tickets, no u-turn tickets, no stop lights. There were the underground driven cable cars and I think I noticed an above ground electricity propelled transit as well. On the re-build after the earthquake, they built a huge system of those with electric wires criss-crossing the streets. Much of that was torn out when the gasoline companies paid the city to tear them out so that vehicle transportation would be predominately gasoline.

a reply to: gortex

Cool video. Buncha hoodlum jaywalkers, the drivers were just as erratic and selfish.

a reply to: gortex

Oh, the good old days of San Francisco. Back when the only feces on the streets and sidewalks came from a horse or other non-human animal.

a reply to: gortex
Very cool video! Just 4 days later San Francisco was struck by an earthquake estimated to be 7.9. It hit at 5:12AM and an estimated 3,000 lives were lost.

I only know these things because my granddaughter was born exactly 100 years later.

Awesome vid thanks for sharing. I have to say people often say I want to go back to when things were simpler. But in watching this video to be honest all I see is people remaining the same and the technology is just different. Either way it's cool and gave me something to think about. But yea I was basically thinking it was a slower moving highway or downtown area with erratic drivers, just in one of its's previous forms. Who knows what the final one will be but human nature I think will remain the same.

originally posted by: tamusan
a reply to: gortex

Oh, the good old days of San Francisco. Back when the only feces on the streets and sidewalks came from a horse or other non-human animal.

Funny you say so, but even by the video there was even in them days less horse 💩 then people poopy. Incredible.

a reply to: gortex

I remember this. But not for the first market street video.

There was a long lost film by the same brothers after the quake. About 5 years ago they finally found it at a flea market.




Here's a side by side one with different footage used.

Two things struck me:

1. You could just hop onto any open cart and ride it? Haha

2. Why is it, the majority of cars seem to drive a little way, then U-turn onto the other side and drive back down the other way?

Where were they going? Or where ARE they going?

Or was this just some ancient form of "merging" into traffic? lol

Do you ever get the feeling they know they are being filmed?

Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire

Pictures San Francisco's main thoroughfare as seen from the front window of a moving Market Street cable car, before the downtown area was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. This unusual record has been called the first "structural film" because it follows exactly the externally imposed structure of the car ride.

Here is a post from the SFGate blog that explains some of the history of this film and how film scholar David Kiehn discovered that it was in fact produced in 1906 (just before the quake and fire), not 1905:

The first track from Airs' Moon Safari album, accompanied by scenes from the Market Street video.