A Hundred Year Stroll Down Market Street

With our move to San Francisco drawing ever nearer, I’ve been doing some research and brushing up on the geography, current events and history of the city.

I’ve been going there my entire life and even lived there briefly in the late seventies, but it doesn’t hurt to augment what I think I know with actual facts, now does it?

While doing my homework I stumbled across a great video called Lost Landscapes Of San Francisco by The Long Now Foundation, which is a series of historic pieces of film – primarily home movies – that have been restored and edited together in an approximately hour-long presentation that you’ll find in its entirety here.

While watching one segment, which was shot from a cable car that trundled down Market Street in 1905, I wondered what Google Street View would have for me if I were to punch in the addresses that would put the 2009 Google camera car about where the 1905 cable car was at any given point in the film.

The San Francisco Ferry Building served as an awesome reference for this because, even though it was built in 1895, it’s still standing – and the cable car camera operator in 1905 kept it in the shot as they headed toward it.

I also went elsewhere in the “Lost Landscapes..” video and grabbed a couple of screen shots from 1941 which also show the Ferry Building.

The result of my total digression from actually learning anything other than a few photo-editing skills are as follows..

Market Street with the Ferry Building at the end. It’s the tall structure that is the only constant in all of these shots.. everything else  changes drastically over time. This is from the 1905 film..

From roughly the same point of view in 1941..

And then as seen on Google Street View in 2009..

A shot closer to the Ferry Building, taken towards the
end of the 1905 film, as the cable car approached the building..

Then another shot from 1941..

And finally, a 2009 screen grab from Google
Street View that’s as close as I can get it..

They renovated the end of Market Street so that it now veers to the right
instead of going all the way up to the Ferry Building. Please note
that palm trees are not indigenous to the  San Francisco area
(too cold) – you won’t see any in the old films.

I recommend watching the video in its entirety even if you’re not familiar with San Francisco, just because it’s interesting to see how much things change over just a few generations. If you don’t have time for that, the cable car trip down Market Street is about ten minutes long, and it’s fun to count how many people almost get run over by other cable cars, horse-drawn wagons and those new-fangled motor cars in the days before crosswalks and traffic lights.

The answer, by the way, is a LOT.

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Tagged as: cable cars, film preservation, Market Street, old movies, San Francisco, The Ferry Building, vintage film