A Trip Down Market Street (1906)

Original title

A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire

Directed by

Harry Miles

Genre

silent film, phantom ride

Country

United States

Runtime

13 min

Rating

6.5 of 10 from 31 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This silent film shows a cable car ride down Market Street in San Francisco in 1906. It captures the city's daily life, including its people, vehicles, and buildings, just before a major earthquake destroyed much of it.

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What happens

A Trip Down Market Street is a 1906 film shot from a cable car as it travels down Market Street in San Francisco. It is notable for capturing the city shortly before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The film shows details of daily life in a major early 20th-century American city, including the transportation, fashions and architecture of the era. The film begins at 8th Street and continues eastward to the cable car turntable, at the Embarcadero, in front of the Ferry Building. The perspective of seeing action only ahead and not the vehicle itself was known as a "phantom ride". On April 17, two of the four Miles Brothers—Harry and Joseph—boarded a train for New York, taking the film with them, but they heard about the earthquake and sent the film to New York while they boarded another train headed back to San Francisco. The Turk Street house of Earl Miles survived the earthquake and the subsequent catastrophic fire but the studio did not. The Miles brothers based their business out of Earl's home, and shot more film of post-earthquake scenes; some of this footage, including that of a second trip down a now devastated Market Street, reemerged in 2016. In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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