A Trip Down Market Street
Footage reveals a bustling San Francisco prior to the 1906 fire and earthquake that devastated the city
Today we are watching a bit of “A Trip Down Market Street,” a 1906 film taken by the Miles Brothers from the front of a cable car traveling down San Francisco’s Market Street. It is made available through the Prelinger Archives. The film is a notable example of the “phantom ride” technique, which provided early theater-goers the experience of moving while sitting in a movie theater chair. Of equal importance is the timing of the filming—modern research and analysis puts the date of the film at late March, 1906, a mere three weeks before an earthquake and subsequent fire razed much of the city.
The Miles Brothers, although not widely remembered, played an large and important part in the early history of motion pictures. Prior to the practice of allowing theaters to rent films, film distributors sold their reels to theaters outright, sight unseen. This costly model kept most theaters from profitability, and thus only a handful of theaters were able to consistently offer moving pictures. Film exchanges, on the other hand, allowed movie houses to rent or lease reels to be shown on their own in-house equipment. This changed the business entirely, with less-expensive nickelodeon storefronts springing up to offer films to an enthusiastic populace willing to pay a nickel (or up to a dime!) for the thrill of watching short-duration moving pictures. Numerous film distribution houses popped up around the dawn of the 20th century throughout the United States, the four Miles brothers being one of the first to establish a film exchange business in 1902. The Miles Brothers based their business in San Francisco, importing films from Europe as well as buying films from the active handful of US production studios operating at the time; soon they went nation-wide, opening an office in New York and becoming the first film exchange to operate on a coast-to-coast national level. Theirs was also the first movie studio on the West Coast, established to create narrative films. They opened their studio in the spring of 1906 at 1139 Market Street in San Francisco and shot two films soon after: “A Trip Down Mt. Tamalpais,” with a copyrite date of April 21, and the Market Street ride shown above, fastening their camera to the front of a cable car to achieve the “phantom ride” sensation.
Fortunately for buffs of cinematic history, two of the four Miles Brothers had set off to New York City by train with their film the night before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The fire that followed the quake destroyed the Market Street studio where the reels had been previously kept. Sending the film on to New York, the brothers returned to San Francisco and filmed the aftermath of their destroyed city. Side-by-side with the footage from their “phantom ride” taken only a few weeks earlier, the differences are stark.
Sadly, Miles Brothers was never able to rebuild the Market Street studio. They continued temporary operations in one of the brother’s undestroyed homes for a while where they processed the “after” footage taken on Market Street. Alas, feeling pressure from Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company (you may recall I wrote a bit about MPPC last week), they ceased studio operations entirely in 1908. Three of the four brothers went on to other work in the film industry; production, distribution and storage. Understandibly enraged, brother Herbert Miles took up the banner of opposing MPPC to establish an independent production and distribution network outside of the Edison cartel, partnering with several film business notables including Carl Laemmle (who would go on to found Universal Studios and use his influence to save endangerd Jews in Germany) and nickelodeon magnate William (Fuchs) Fox (who would create Fox Film, a studio he would eventually lose in the merger to 20th Century Fox).
“A Trip Down Market Street” has been recognized by the Library of Congress for its historical significance and archived by the National Film Registry. You can watch the entire clip here: Internet Archive: A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire (4K scan, 2018-10-11)
A film made for an exhibit at the Computer History Museum compares Google Street View snapshots of 2011 San Francisco with those from the 1906 film. Things have changed… a bit.
SFGate Blog (archived): "Market Street on film 1906" by mgarrone, 4/30/10
Wikipedia: A Trip Down Market Street
San Francisco Silent Film Festival: "The Brothers Who Filmed the Earthquake" by David Kiehn, 2006
JSTOR: Film History Journal, "The origins of the film exchange" by Max Alvarez, 2005
History: 1905, First nickelodeon opens
New York Times: "Laemmle’s List: A Mogul’s Heroism" by Neal Gabler, 4/11/14
I love all those cars and wagons just crossing seemingly at random back and forth right in front of the moving cable cars. Just, y'know, drive wherever, it's cool. :-D
Look at all those hat-wearing jaywalkers!