Watch A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire For Free

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

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...

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.

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.

"A Trip Down Market Street" is an eleven-minute short film shot from a cable car as it journeys down Market Street, San Francisco. Shot days before the great earthquake of 1906, the film consists of a simple POV shot taken from the car as it journeys in a straight line, slowly prowling a city that bustles with activity.The street itself is expansive, packed with pedestrians, a few old fashioned automobiles, trucks, horses and buggies. With no apparent traffic lights, lane demarcations or highway codes, and with everyone dodging and weaving their way through the commotion, it's amazing that no accidents occur.Needless to say, watching the film today is like hopping into a time machine. The formal fashion, body language, architecture, hairstyles, beards, hats, clothes, storefronts and advertisements on display are all interesting. Eerily, the hundreds of men, women and children whom we observe with curiosity are themselves observing us with interest, for they have clearly never seen a movie camera before, which in their eyes must seem like an odd, alien thing.As the film was shot just days before the great quake and fire of 1906, an incident which nearly destroyed San Francisco, the film has a somewhat sad, haunting quality. Or rather, we imbue the film with a sense of loss.8/10 - Film archivists Rick Prelinger and David Kiehn are responsible for uncovering, investigating the origins of and restoring the film.