#1906

The sky at night. Shaggycoat, the biography of a beaver. 1906. Cover detail.

Ball gown, Au Bon Marché (1905-1906)

This is real footage from 120 years ago.

None of the people in it knew that the city around them had four days left…

What you are watching is a cable car gliding down Market Street in San Francisco, filmed on the 14th of April, 1906.

The camera was mounted on the front of the car, so you see the city exactly as it was: the crowds, the horse-drawn carriages, the early automobiles weaving through traffic, the men in hats, the great buildings rising on either side. An ordinary spring afternoon in a thriving American city.

Four days later, on the morning of the 18th of April, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck. The shaking lasted under a minute, but it ignited fires that burned through the city for days…

By the time it was over, more than 3,000 people were dead and roughly 80 percent of San Francisco had been destroyed. Almost every building you see in this footage was gone.

And the film itself nearly went with it.

The negative was placed on a train bound for New York on the 17th of April, the day before the earthquake. Had it left a single day later, it would have burned in the fire along with the studio that made it.