A Trip Down Market Street 1906 San Francisco

This film from 1906 in downtown San Francisco was made 4 days before the great earthquake destroyed the city at 5:12 AM on April 18th, 1906. It is filmed from the front of a cable car, heading east toward the ferry terminal building, which is the tower in the background (which survived the quake and still stands today). Filmed by the Miles Brothers, 14 April, 1906

• Category

  Film & Animation

[guigal2]

No minimum wage, no protection on the job, no voting rights for women, and a life expectancy of 47.

If you'd lived there you'd very likely have been toiling in a factory since the age of 10, or selling newspapers on the street like some of the kids in the film. Definitive child labor regulations didn't come along until 1938.

So much for a libertarian paradise.

[AlaskaTrucker]

How different the world was 100 years ago, thanks for posting: Love it!

[MultiKdizzle]

Trust me this resembles some parts of Asia in 2013.

[MultiKdizzle]

Even if they were 0 in this video, they would be 107 now. The living standards back then are too poor for that

[Scott Smith]

people just driving and walking where ever they want and shit, lol

[Scott Smith]

My grandpa would always tell me te story of how when he was 3 years old his father had him washing car parts in acetone at his shop in the 20s

[tx2vt]

So chaotic, holy shit.

It's still like this in a lot of developing countries... would give me a panic attack

[guigal2]

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, which in this case means we should be all the more wary of it.

[TribalKatz]

You can throw all the facts and figures you want, but ask an elderly man or woman if they wish they could go back to the times of their youth and they will almost always say "Yes". You see, it's not about how society treated you, it's how you dealt with it. Back then people had strength of character to deal with life, they had their wits, they had their self-reliance, they had moxie. The past might look daunting, but someone today with the right kind of chutzpah could very well come to love it.

[McLarenMercedes]

Yeah, but I bet people in 1806 would have considered the 1906 world a fantasy. In 1806 there was no electricity, telegraph, telephone, radio, high rise buildings, sewer systems (that was a serious problem in cities), no knowledge of bacteria, no modern medicine, no cars, no trains, no planes, no steam ships.

1806 was a pre-industrial era, 1906 was industrial and ripe with new innovations. Today we have just refined and improved what they already had.

[MIXERPILOT1]

Have you seen the after earthquake film going down the same section?

[Mboonemn]

I thought the exact same thing