Do you have a favorite movie made in San Francisco?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. A Trip Down Market Street

A Trip Down Market Street



Directed by: Miles Brothers
Cinematography: Harry Miles
Release date: April 21, 1906
Running time: 13 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English

A Trip Down Market Street is a 13-minute actuality film recorded by placing a movie camera on the front of a cable car as it traveled down San Francisco’s Market Street. The film shows many details of daily life in a major early 20th century 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 Ferry Building. Landmarks passed in the latter part of the first half include the Call Building (then San Francisco's tallest) and the Palace Hotel (both on the right; Lotta's Fountain is on the left between the two but is in the shade). The film was produced by the four Miles brothers: Harry, Herbert, Earle and Joe. It is notable for capturing San Francisco four days before the city's devastating earthquake and fire, which started on the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906.

The Miles brothers had been producing films in New York including films shot in San Francisco. In September 1905 they shot the fight between Oscar "Battling" Nelson and Jimmy Britt in Colma, California, just south of San Francisco city limits. The Miles brothers established a studio at 1139 Market Street in San Francisco in early 1906. They shot a railroad descent down Mount Tamalpais as well as the Market Street film. On April 17, Harry and Joe Miles boarded a train for New York, taking the two films with them, but they heard about the earthquake and sent the films to New York while they boarded another train headed back to San Francisco. The Turk Street house of Earle Miles survived the earthquake and subsequent catastrophic fire but the studio did not. The Miles brothers based their business out of Earle's home, and shot more film of post-earthquake scenes; some of this footage, including that of a second trip down a now devastated Market Street, reemerged in 2016. It is likely that the Market Street film survives today because it was sent away before the fire.

Several 35mm prints exist with slight changes in footage. Copies are held at the Library of Congress and the Prelinger Archives. A digital version is viewable online at Internet Archive, YouTube and Wikimedia Commons. In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
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Dating the film

The film was originally thought to have been made in September or October 1905, based on the angles of shadows showing the sun's 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 sun's 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 was featured in a 60 Minutes segment discussing the historiography of the film, especially the problem of dating it. In 2011, Richard Greene, an engineer with Bio-Rad Laboratories, published research dating the film to March 24–30, 1906, based on the sun throwing well-defined shadows on the Ferry Building. Greene confirmed that the film was shot at about 3:17 in the afternoon, based on the Ferry Building clock. Greene notes that his calculated date range is consistent with Kiehn's findings, but not consistent with the date of April 14 which was published in 2011 by the Internet Movie Database without a supporting cite. He also notes that his date range is about three weeks prior to the earthquake, inconsistent with the "one week" claim in the New York Clipper advertisement. A further source the AFI's Catalog of Holdings 1978 states the film is from 1902 rather than 1906. This is most likely incorrect as some of the cars have ragtop or bonnets which was not a commonality in 1902. Many cars of 1902 were still mostly open-aired and many still had levered-steering.

Here it is at archive.org:

A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire (compressed HD version)

There are several versions at YouTube. For whatever reason, some have had sound added. Forget them. This is the version linked from the Wikipedia article:

[FULL HD] A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire
17,986 views•Oct 6, 2017

Jannes Höke
7 subscribers

I suggest you download the higher-quality version of this video at https://archive.org/details/sanfran_h... since YouTube applies some compression of its own.

The original fuddage is taken from https://archive.org/details/ATripDown... but I undid their poor attempt at interpolation and compressed it.

The video was recorded in 1906 in San Francisco, shortly before many of those buildings were destroyed by an earthquake and the fires that followed it.

Lincensed under CC0 1.0 Universal