A Trip Down Market Street (1906)
A camera mounted on a moving cable car glides down San Francisco's Market Street toward the Ferry Building, recording pedestrians, streetcars, wagons, and early automobiles all jostling for space in the roadway.
A Trip Down Market Street was filmed by the Miles Brothers just days before the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed much of the street it records, turning an ordinary promotional travelogue into an accidental, and now invaluable, time capsule.
Background
A camera crew from the Miles Brothers mounted a motion-picture camera on the front of a moving cable car and filmed the entire length of San Francisco’s Market Street, capturing pedestrians, streetcars, horse-drawn wagons, and some of the earliest automobiles all sharing the same crowded roadway. It was made as an ordinary promotional travelogue, the kind of city-view film common in the early years of cinema.
What to watch for
What gives the film its unusual power is timing: it was shot only days before the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fires that followed, which destroyed much of the street and the buildings visible in the footage. Watch it as an accidental historical record, a snapshot of ordinary daily life in a city about to be devastated, rather than for any artistic ambition on the part of its makers; that context is almost entirely what has kept the film significant for more than a century.
