trip down market street

A Trip Down Market Street (originally a silent film), was made in 1905 by Jack Kuttner with a Bell and Howell 2909 camera mounted on the front of a cable car. It details Market Street in San Francisco a year before the 1906 earthquake and fire. This film is really a piece of work. Even though the film itself is in rough shape, the detail you can see in it is still pretty remarkable. The camera, cutting edge for its time (and is still respected today by camera aficionados), is a hand-cranked camera, the first one with the dual-reel design. You know, the ones you've seen in the movies. Apparently it takes some skill to hand-crank film at a constant speed of 16 frames per second. What's also sort of interesting is how Market Street still sort of looks the same a hundred years later. The buildings are all different, except for the Ferry Building which is at the end of Market Street (the building that gets closer and closer in the film). Riding the F-Market streetcar line nowadays, the view hasn't changed all that much. Well, there was a time when the Embarcadero Freeway ran directly in front of the Ferry Building, but after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the city finally had enough momentum to take it down. (If you haven't read it, I wrote an article on waterfront freeways back in May 2005.) Coming out on DVD on 1 August 2006 is Market Street 1905/2005, a documentary celebrating the 100th anniversary of the original film. The DVD includes Melinda Stone's 2005 remake of the 1905 original using both a Sony PD-170 digital video camera and an original Bell and Howell 2909 film camera from 1922 mounted on the front of a streetcar.