The City on the Edge: San Francisco, April 1906

Nothing fires the imagination like the thought of time travel.  If we could only go forward; if we could only go back. But no machine yet invented can send us; no machine ever will.  But we can travel back, if only in a sense, through the magic of video. True, it's like viewing the world through a keyhole, but it's all we have and all we ever will have, and no piece of film does it better than the Miles Brothers film,  A Trip Down Market Street, which was shot just days before the great earthquake which destroyed San Francisco in April of 1906.  I invite you to view it at

                                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEvB_ZIWtAg

Get past the commercial and begin your journey.

There's a dreamlike quality, almost a modern-day familiarity in watching these scenes.  It's 1906 and it's life as usual: Traffic is chaotic. A cop walking his beat casts a wary eye at the camera; businessmen in boiled shirts and bowler hats are everywhere; a paperboy peddles the day's news; a trolley full of sightseers crosses Market Street at an oblique angle; brass-era cars rattle past, dodging horses and wagons; the few women evident are dressed in dark, ankle-length dresses some in ostrich-plumed hats.  In the distance at the foot of Market Street is the Ferry Building--an earthquake survivor which stand majestically to this day. I could go on.

I've watched this film a hundred times, and each time I try to see more and I do see more.  It's almost like being there--you feel so close.

Near the end of the film at the Ferry Building, the cable car is turned around. Young boys jump into view and wave at the camera. They're all gone now of course, everyone is gone, lost to the earthquake, or to their years.  But they wave at us as though it is today--more than a century later.

Addendum: The last known survivor of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 earthquake has passed away: http://www.marinij.com/obituaries/20160111/marin-resident-bill-del-monte-last-known-survivor-of-1906-quake-dies-at-109