1906 Trolley trip down Market Street, San Francisco

[Bernard]

For all you Tram & Trolley lovers here is a fil taken in 1906 (the date is wrong on the video) with a camera mounted at the head of a San Francisco Trolley just days (2 in fact) before the terrible Earthquake.

There was a piece on this yesterday in the USA on the television show "Sunday Morning". The footage is amazing!

 

And here is the aftermath 2 days later:

[KenS]

Great videos, particularly the first.

 

I was expecting the horse-drawn carts and automobiles, but the number of bicycles was quite a surprise.

 

And apparently the concept of traffic lanes was in its infancy. 

[Bernard]

My first question was how did that film survive the earthquake? The night before the earthquake the production sent the film out to NYC to its distributor.

The other thing that hits me is that in 2 days most of the people in the film are going to die in the quake.

Think about 1906 and that at that time the director had the sense to mount the camera at the head of the trolley and for the entire ride the cameraman was hand cranking the camera.

[spacecadet]

Great videos, particularly the first.

 

I was expecting the horse-drawn carts and automobiles, but the number of bicycles was quite a surprise.

 

And apparently the concept of traffic lanes was in its infancy.  

 

The amazing thing to me in videos like this is always how many people are walking in the middle of the road.  I know cars were slower in those days, but still.  I also know that automobile-pedestrian accidents were a huge problem in the early days of the automobile, and it's easy to see why.  People were still walking around the same way they did around horse-drawn carriages.

 

btw I saw this footage posted on a news site the other day, but I'm sure I've seen it before in either a National Geographic or History Channel documentary on the earthquake.

 

btw here is the same trip taken in 2005:

 

[Mudkip Orange]

The thing I've always loved about this video is how many cars go past two... or three... or four times.

 

All those U-turns in front of the train? Yeah, they wanted San Francisco to seem a modern city, full of auto traffic, so they had the same cars pace the camera the entire way, passing, stopping, and passing again.

[KenS]

And now the cars just look old, and it's the bicycles that look like their modern equivalents (well, some modern equivalents).

 

Although I don't think the cable-car design ever changed.  I rode a nearly identical one fifteen years ago when I was in SF on a business trip.

[Mudkip Orange]

Although I don't think the cable-car design ever changed.  I rode a nearly identical one fifteen years ago when I was in SF on a business trip.

The cable cars that made it past 1950 were kept mostly as a sentimentality, so changing the aesthetics would be contrary to that.

 

Of the three lines that operate now only the Powell and Mason operates its entire original route length; most of the California Street Line became the #1 bus, and what's now the Powell and Hyde cable car was formed by grafting the northern third of the original Hyde/5th Avenue line onto the Powell and Mason route - the rest of the Hyde/5th line became the #27 bus.

[Bernard]

The thing I've always loved about this video is how many cars go past two... or three... or four times.

 

All those U-turns in front of the train? Yeah, they wanted San Francisco to seem a modern city, full of auto traffic, so they had the same cars pace the camera the entire way, passing, stopping, and passing again.

 

Good observation because that is exactly what the director told the motorist to do. When "Sunday Morning" did the piece, they went down the trolley line in on of the restored trolleys from that time period. Being a New Yorker myself, a long time ago we used to have trolley lines but with the increase of motor cars, they caused a lot of traffic jams.