Boston trolley ride 1903

[sauroid1]

Old Bostonian here, loved Jordan Marsh and the BPL shots. Washington St. sure looked busy then. Maybe my great grand parents were among those crowds.

[617AV86892]

Just think every last one of those people has passed on.

[mlmr11]

Wow the old Jordan Marsh building ...The back bay never looked so authentic :)

[jgauthier522]

Lol...that video just goes to show you, that know matter what you do there is always going to be congestion & traffic in Boston.

[LetsBeProud]

Anyone noticed that Boston still looks the same.

[Trolleymoose]

Wow! Like a time machine. Looks like people had very lille concern for an approaching trolley. Things were sure busy then. Great footage.

[1400deadwood]

did the trolley bump that horse drawn wagon? it appeared ot have done so

[rpmcestmoi]

Thatvis the great boston Public Library at the end of the film. Across the street was the equally great S S Pierce building, gone since the fifties.

[PhotoNika]

so many people on the street!

[inkey2]

@PhotoNika yeah, we think things are crowded now......and back then there were plenty of horses in the streets....there must have been quite an oder in the air, especially on hot humid days. I read someplace that the manure problem was so bad at one time in NYC that the army had to come in and start cleaning up

[scorpietta]

@inkey2 My thoughts exactly. Horses produce smog of a different type, alough their gas is natural. LOL!!!

[inkey2]

@scorpietta yeah, there was a reason everyone had an iron "boot scraper" outside their door step in the old days. I think on Beacon Hill some buildings still have them on the door steps (although people today have no idea what it is). Before you entered a home you had to drag your shoe soles across the iron blade of the scraper and I'll be on a damp steamy day the smell was pure hell

[scorpietta]

@inkey2 Interesting to know, I'll look next time I'm in town.

[mlmr11]

@inkey2 OMG inkey they are all over Boston!! I never knew what those were for!!

[inkey2]

@mlmr11 yeah, I have not been to Beacon hill in ages....like30 years.....but i do remember some houses still had boot scrapers on the front steps etc. Some were pretty plain lookinig...and if you didn'y know what it was there is no way you would even begin to guess using the mind of a 21st century person. Things were pretty primitive at the turn of the century....My late father was born in 1916 and had some amazing stories about the old days.......

[inkey2]

@mlmr11 Part 2......another thing that was common then and in newton where I live a few houses still have them......"a hitching post" for horses.....some are very plain ....picture a black painted wrought iron pipe about 3 or 4 feet high, on top of that a baseball sized ball of wrought iron on the top...then through the round ball part a big iron ring....some actually had an iron horse head instead of a ball on top. People tied the leather reins of their horse to the ring

[mlmr11]

@inkey2 My grandfather was in the textile industry as were all good Italian immigrants at this time. When he was out of work he would work as a street cleaner . He said in the summer time the smell of the horseshit would actually stick to your nostrils and that would be all you could smell for days even if you weren't any where near it.

[2012alexg]

The first ever railfan video

[Bootleg127]

Incredible video.  Thank you.

[Madness832]

Like 0:36: Jordan Marsh! What memories! :D

[VinDcator]

Horse-driven side=by-side with the trolleys! What a trip!

[amazing763]

It looks like it was shot at about 16 frames per second but shown at 24 fps. Doesn't the software that was used for preparing the video have a way to show every other frame twice, reducing the speed of those hurried pedestrians?

[luckyowl249]

Boston's still a charming city! Many thanks for sharing!

[tafatmit]

Astounding - thanks so much for posting!

[rainydaywoman1957]

i want more of these!

[donnar50]

What a beautiful time capsule! Dennis Lehane (of Mystic River fame)recently released a mystery novel of Boston in the early 20th century. He read an excerpt from it two years ago at the Cape Cod writers conference describing a police strike march held on the many of those same streets during that era. How evocative these images are! Now I want to read that book at once! Boston was a bustling hub even then!

Incredible images on a miserable cloudy day.

[dpjaexp]

OK, that was absolutely incredible. I felt like I was in a time machine. What a wonder YouTube is!!!! Did you see? It went right in front of Jordan's, and then the scene changed and it was on Boylston Street, took a left on Dartmouth, in Copley Square. Maybe it was headed down Huntington Avenune from there. Amazing, absolutely amazing. THANK YOU.

[videonut33]

The start of the Green Line.