San Francisco Street Scene, 1906

You may have seen this before, I first came across it a couple years ago. Anyway, I thought of it yesterday and decided to post it for anyone who missed it before.

A camera was mounted on a streetcar in San Francisco in 1906 (a few days before the famous earthquake/fire).

The street scene (to me at least) is totally fascinating. The most interesting points, I think, are:

The lack of traffic rules. For the most part, traffic keeps to the right, though even that is not a universal practice. Other than that, it’s pretty much a free-for-all. And yet it seems to work (though that may be only because of the relatively light vehicle traffic). Pedestrians seem as little interested in rules as drivers.

Almost all (maybe all, I’m not sure) of the automobiles used right-hand drive. When did that change, I wonder?

People are so well-dressed. Perhaps Market Street may have been more ‘up-market’ (so to speak) than other areas of the city, but it is still interesting that that nobody was in anything approaching business casual. This practice of dressing up to go out in public lasted for quite a while past 1906, of course (I remember my mom getting quite dressed up for shopping trips to downtown Phoenix in the fifties), and even such casual (in our time) occasions as going to a sports event called for a surprising degree of formality. Here’s a picture of Sandy Amoros’s great catch that saved the 1955 World Series for the Dodgers (I remember the game very well). Look at the crowd – every man (there are, as far as I can tell, no women) is wearing a suit coat, and with one or two exceptions, a tie.

An interesting though sobering thought is to look at the people in the San Francisco video and wonder how their lives changed (in some cases, perhaps, how their lives ended) just a few days later.