1906 film, a road in San Francisco, 11-min

spinningmagnets

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The accompanying music is somewhat haunting and poignant, if you have a "background music" preference, perhaps you might open a new tab and click on the youtube of your preferred artist?

A film camera was attached to the front of a trolley...Lots of pedestrians and horse-drawn carts, frequent cars...the occasional puff of smoke indicates that some cars are steam-powered...cars seemed to travel at the speed of a person jogging...

Rider on horseback, treated by passersby as completely normal, at 6:03

At 6:44 pedestrians are shown clinging to the rear of cars in order to help them "get up the hill"

Bicycles seen at 2:33, 3:18, 4:47, 5:25, 5:35, 9:22

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This was an highly transitional time. Cars had just recently been invented (but were expensive), horses were the mature technology that was widely well-understood. Bicycles were booming since 1890...

Shortly after this was filmed, San Francisco suffered a devastating and historic earthquake. There was a subsequent fire that destroyed almost as much as the earthquake...a few years later, WW-One changed everything...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEvB_ZIWtAg&feature=youtu.be
 
That's a very famous SF film, 'A Trip Down Market Street' if I recall. Only survived the quake because they couldn't process movie film in SF. I posted that a few places when it first reemerged, I probably put it here but I'm on my phone and can't search.

Some of the pre WWII films edited to post war footage is heartbreaking.
 
spinningmagnets said:
4-minute film of a Berlin street (Germany), 1900

More pedestrians than anything else.

Bicycle at 0:30, cargo trike (on the right) at 0:40, then, (for a split second) bicycle on the right at 1:29, cargo trike at 1:53 and 2:07, bicycle at 2:50, Homeless dog at 3:00,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-m9A8mY-U0

This is really neat. You keep expecting squish, but miraculously it doesn't happen. The cars travel mostly in u-turns, diagonals and S-curves. They are right hand drive, which doesn't matter much as they go on either side of the road. It's clear that bikes and cars are the big hazards and are destined to honk everyone else off the road.

I didn't see any horses pooing which I remember said as the main driver to get rid of them. Though there was one guy sweeping something off the street.
 
spinningmagnets said:
4-minute film of a Berlin street (Germany), 1900
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-m9A8mY-U0
Wow, Germany 1900 seems so much more advanced than SF.....i guess they had a few more years to prepare ! :lol:
But the stand out feature for me is the hats in Germany...nearly everybody was wearing a hat !!
But if you watch the post war video that follows, ....the hats are gone ? :shock:
 
I guess the hat factory was bombed like everything else.

[youtube]Es6f7K4c-y8[/youtube]

[youtube]R5i9k7s9X_A[/youtube]

[youtube]AlSb4KnxD7Q[/youtube]
 
It's my understanding that when most men would walk, ride a bike, or ride a street car {light rail?} then a hat kept the sun out of your eyes, and the rain off your hair. When cars became popular, hats fell by the wayside from the inconvenience of needing to constantly take them off and put them back on...It took a while, but...hats and cars don't mix well.
 
Dauntless said:
That's a very famous SF film, 'A Trip Down Market Street' if I recall. Only survived the quake because they couldn't process movie film in SF. I posted that a few places when it first reemerged, I probably put it here but I'm on my phone and can't search.

I think Spinningmagnet's has more footage but do you mean this one?

[youtube]NINOxRxze9k[/youtube]
 
:shock: More hats again !
what is/was the reason for hat wearing ?...what caused it to stop, and when ?
and they seemed to have no traffic control at all, with cars etc randomly going both direction on both sides of the roads !
.. at least current day Cab drivers have maintained that tradition ! :lol:
 
Hillhater said:
what is/was the reason for hat wearing ?...what caused it to stop, and when ?
There is some discussion of that in previous posts in this thread. ;)
 
:oops: Ahh, no sorry, missed that post somehow .
spinningmagnets said:
It's my understanding that when most men would walk, ride a bike, or ride a street car {light rail?} then a hat kept the sun out of your eyes, and the rain off your hair. When cars became popular, hats fell by the wayside from the inconvenience of needing to constantly take them off and put them back on...It took a while, but...hats and cars don't mix well.
i was watching a doco last week and they had an old factory building in the UK which used to be a Glove manufacturer.
That one factory employed 30,000 people at its peak. :shock: ..just making gloves !
How many people used to be employed making hats in the US, i wonder ? :?:
 
I found a old beaut early last century film of my old town downunder with hats, horses, bikes and even a fight

[youtube]5DdCiF0V1Ak[/youtube]
 
From John Harte, 'How Winston Churchill Saved the world,' out earlier this year:

Edwardian silk top hats gave way to more utilitarian bowlers, and then the more casual and debonair trilby hat for the middle and upper classes between wars. Cloth caps were for the the countryside and the working classes manner and clothing were less formal. . . Women abandoned decorative wide brimmed Edwardian hats for more practical ones in a new era of open vehicles, which gave them confidence they were in tune with the times.

This being on page 3, don't ask what's on page 4 until I get there, the hat being a burning issue I grabbed the phone as I was reading this.

Bowlers, remind, would be easy to miss in those films with men tiny in the frame.

But we had a TV commercial in recent years making fun if the obsession with stove pipe hats of Abraham Lincoln's time. Don't know if it aired outside the U.S.
 
One of the trivia of interest about the Kennedy presidency was that...for his inauguration, he insisted that he would wear a stovepipe hat (silk tophat?), like one of his idols, Lincoln. Kennedy foresaw that race relations in the US were at a crossroads, and he intended to propose legislation that went on to become the civil rights act of 1964 (pushed through by Johnson, after Kennedy's death).

With Lincoln having pushed through the Emancipation Proclamation (at great political risk), Kennedy wanted to align himself with Lincoln, and insisting on a top-hat was one of the many small details that he included. The only problem was...

Very few hatters still made stove-pipe hats, and the few who still did for the movie and theater world?...none of them had any molds around which to make a stove-pipe hat that would fit Kennedy's larger-than-average head. Of course, being asked to provide a prominent item for a presidential inauguration was enough incentive for an older gentleman with the requisite experience and skills to come out of retirement and solve the dilemma.

Kennedy and Eisenhower, wearing top-hats...

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Very cool film... and soo close to when the Earthquake... and really, more damaging, fire that followed. What I had not realized is how little the street cars have changed, for me they are normally just a nuisance (they wake me up every day, considering they are only 20ft out my front window, and love to ring their bell as they pass by). But seeing this film definitely gives me a little more appreciation for them, and of course everyone that visits me loves seeing them, it's one of the things people always picture when they think of SF (as well as the Golden Gate Bridge... which you have to go to the roof to see from my place).

If you look at pictures/footage of the earthquake/fire, or shortly after... it is astonishing to go back and what this. Pretty much every single building on my street was built the following year, including mine (well, rebuilt in some sense, but everything was burnt down, pretty much nothing left to salvage).
 
Hehe... San Francisco 1906 Earthquake Market Street
[youtube]cMuM8sPWyQ8[/youtube]

Wanna buy a condo?

Stage 1075 – 1075 Market St:
http://www.sfbrandnewcondos.com/properties/stage-1075-1075-market-st/

"1 Bike Parking Space for all units"... "23 off-street parking spaces at the basement level"... No word yet re any earthquake insurance. :wink:
 
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