Market Street on film 1906
The video below is titled "A Trip Down Market Street" and it's true to its name, a 13 minute trip from 8th Street down Market Street to the Ferry Building just days before the great quake of 1906. You'll see a vibrant metropolis full of cars, bikes, horses, cable cars and people traversing Market St. The detective story behind the film clip is almost as interesting as what it contains. (Please note that there are rolling frames and a slight stall in the early part of the film which end at the 1 minute 40 second mark.)
The film was shot by early San Francisco film innovators the Miles Brothers and has been widely available through the Library of Congress and You Tube (which has a novel version set to an Air soundtrack) and was originally dated to the fall of 1905 but recently local author and silent film historian David Kiehn made some surprising discoveries about its date. He had seen "A Trip Down Market Street" many times over the years but it was only around 2005 that he managed to get ahold of a 16mm print which made him "all the more curious about it." The Library of Congress had researched and dated the filming to September or October of 1905. Per Kiehn, "some thought it was shot earlier in 1904 but since the Library of Congress had narrowed it down to that point everyone thought that it was shot in 1905." Read the Library of Congress' description of the film's date here.
At first Kiehn was just trying to confirm the 1905 shoot date so he thought "gee, there were 5 newspapers in San Francisco at that time so somebody must have written about it." He dug through the San Francisco Public Library's collection of microfilm starting with August of 1905 and running through October 1905. He went "page by page and couldn't find a single thing about it so I looked at the film again more closely and I noticed that there were puddles in the cavities by the rails on the street and especially at the end of the film autos drive through puddles splashing water." So, he went back to the papers and checked the weather reports for the period only to find that September and October of 1905 were "as dry as a bone."
Kiehn took a look at the angle of the sun and narrowed the time of year to late March or April 1906. Then he examined the buildings along Market Street, the state of construction narrowed the window down to late 1905 or before the earthquake in 1906. To tie all these pieces together he "went back to the papers to look for information on filming and weather reports. In March and April, especially late March 1906, there was a lot of rain but there weren't any references to any filming being done." But, "being a film historian I then realized that there was a theatrical magazine where filmmakers of the day advertised their films called the New York Clipper. The San Francisco Public Library coincidentally has that magazine on microfilm so I looked at late March and April of 1906."
In the April 28th edition he saw an ad by the Miles Brothers for two films that they were just releasing called "A Trip down Mount Tamalpais" and "A Trip down Market Street." The ad appeared ten days after the April 18, 1906 earthquake but Kiehn notes that this wasn't someone playing games with history. Since print publications required a long lead time for composition it was most likely composed by April 18th, 1906. The films were shot on or around April 12th and shipped to New York on April 17th, the eve of the quake.
That would appear to confirm the date for the film but Kiehn dug deeper by dating the early license plates on cars in the film. The DMV told him that the records no longer existed but he found them in the California State Archives in Sacramento. He eventually found one of the plate numbers from the film, 4867, and traced it to a Jay Anway who registered his car in early 1906 which further verified his research.
There are many other twists and turns along the way to confirming the film's date. Kiehn has written up the entire tale in the most recent issue of the Argonaut.
Kiehn has managed to get the IMDB to change their date for the film but the Library of Congress hasn't updated theirs yet. He hopes they'll come around soon.
The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum will be showing "A Trip Down Mount Tamalpais" this Saturday May 1 which coincides with the Niles Plaza Grand Opening Celebrtation . The museum will unveil more films from their cache at the annual Bronco Billy Silent Film Festival this June 25-27.
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