1911 - A Trip Through New York City Amazing restoration!

[Cattledog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=82&v=aohXOpKtns0

Other than one or two of the world's supercentenarians, nobody remembers New York in 1911. Plenty of living historians and enthusiasts of the city have paid intensive attention to that booming time period when the city's population fast approached five million, but none experienced it first-hand. They, and we, can get no closer to it than watching the footage above, originally shot by a Swedish documentary team which set out to capture the most celebrated places in the world at the time, a list also including Niagara Falls, Paris, Monte Carlo, and Venice. The practically immaculate condition of the film highlights both the similarities and differences between the street life of New York over a century ago and of New York today.

Take a look at the tailored or tailored-looking clothing on nearly everyone, even the one-legged man making his deliberate way past the Chinese grocery. Then as now, most New Yorkers got around on foot, and since the city's first subway line had opened just seven years before, the dominant public transit options remained streetcars and elevated trains.

In the realm of private vehicles, horse-drawn carriages had only just begun to give way to motorcars. (Since 1911 was still the age of silent film, the ambient sound of all this was added later.) "Take note of the surprising and remarkably timeless expression of boredom exhibited by a young girl filmed as she was chauffeured along Broadway in the front seat of a convertible limousine," says the Museum of Modern Art's notes.

MoMA, which exhibited the footage last year, also points out familiar landmarks: "Opening and closing with shots of the Statue of Liberty, the film also includes New York Harbor; Battery Park and the John Ericsson statue; the elevated railways at Bowery and Worth Streets; Broadway sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue; and Madison Avenue." Any modern New Yorker halfway interested in the city will know all those places, and even if the city has changed in countless other ways, they'll sense the very same characteristic vitality in these clips that they feel there today. Will New Yorkers of the future have the same reaction, to, say, the Japanese high-definition video demo footage shot on those very same streets in the 1990s? It'll take about eighty years to find out. We probably won't be here by then, but New York certainly will.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/04/immaculately-restored-film-lets-you-revisit-life-in-new-york-city-in-1911.html

[cyclonefence]

1. Thanks

I loved it. I also noticed the large format of the newspapers.

[mitch96]

3. And lots of horse shit

One of the good things about automobiles was that it got rid of tons of horse shit in the city streets.. Lets hear it for sanitation!!!

m

[cyclonefence]

4. Yeah

In one scene a kid runs across the street and just misses a huge pile. There was also an awful lot of dust in the air, a real haze, I guess from unpaved streets.

[mitch96]

9. And whats with the one legged guy?

He was in a few shots.. Maybe a relative??
"Hey you wanna be in a movie??" right...... what's a movie....
m

[cyclonefence]

10. And in that one long shot

where the one-legged guy was walking, walking toward the camera, did you see the teenage boy come in on the right, totally stealing the show?

I guess the cinematographer wanted to show the interesting sights, and what's more interesting than a one-legged man?

[mitch96]

12. "teenage boy come in on the right, totally stealing the show? "

Total photobomb.. I noticed the same action in a old movie about SanFrancisco before the earthquake. The cinematographer put the camera on a trolly car and just let her go as the trolly went thru town. Kids and young men would just stand in front of the camera and stare.
Different times....
m

[mitch96]

2. This is what my, then 19 yo grandmother saw...

Very different from her home village in eastern europe
m

[Ohiogal]

5. I love old films like this!

It would have been nice if the scenes were identified as to where they were taken as we watched.

No traffic lights -- cars and horse drawn carriages pretty much just drove wherever and tried to avoid each other!

[murielm99]

6. K&R!

[appalachiablue]

7. K & R. This is wonderful, so real life you feel like you're there too.

My great grandfather b. 1864 from Phila. passed through NYC fairly often.

Thanks for posting.

[bucolic_frolic]

8. Thanks for posting

Two of my grandfathers and a great grandfather were living in NYC at that time, my grandfather was 14. Pre-skyscraper era. A sibling or cousin of my great grandfather, we don't know which, was born in 1875 in Europe, came to America on a steamship that also had masts for sails, and died in NY area in 1969. From the horse and buggy age to a man on the moon. Wonder if he was shocked by it all.

[cyclonefence]

11. Reminds me of what my mamaw told me

She said she'd seen Wild Bill's Wild West Show with Geronimo *and* a man walking on the moon.

[smirkymonkey]

13. Amazing video! Thank you for posting this.

Also the website "Open Culture" is a great find as well. So many interesting things to keep you occupied for months!

Thanks again!

[Uncle Joe]

14. After a few minutes of viewing, it feels like a time machine

Thanks for the thread Cattledog

[BigmanPigman]

15. It is interesting watching the choreography of the cars, streetcars

and horses with carts all maneuver around each other. Everyone wore hats and dressed formally. Actually, most people dressed with ties, polished shoes, gloves, etc until the mid 1960s.