MARKET STREET 1905

My editor-in-chief at National Geographic, Bill Garrett, send me this wonderful cinema clip. I replied with my recollections of it and my reactions to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfZX-4iQOgQ&feature=related

Thank you for sending this film clip! I’ve seen it before under unusual circumstances but haven’t been able to locate it.

This simple, brief trip down Market Street toward the ever-looming Terminal Building is magical in the way some Civil War photos can reach out of their glass plates to seize your whole attention. Perhaps the long exposure time accounts for the power of those Brady-era photos., Their subjects were staring, unmoving, at the uncovered lens for up to two minutes, enough time to focus on the camera as it focused on them, so that they seem to be consciously murmuring over time, “We were here at this frozen moment – intensely, minutely, hopefully, humanly. Look at us, alive in this slice of time, look at us. We passionately need your collusion, your acknowledgment of our living in your own focus. If you truly see us, we live.”

And in this sense, the film is more than a oddity. The people who looked up at the camera in 1905, a year before most of the city was destroyed by the great earthquake, were almost, almost aware that we would be seeing them now. They didn’t care particularly because they had their own lives – see them rush to appointments, lunches, tasks – but a few seem aware or even amused that ghosts of the future are passing on the front platform of the Market Street Car.

A good number of the folks on the street are aware that the ride is being filmed. They wave, caper dangerously in front of the car, boys hitch rides on car bumpers and carriages to wave. Perhaps they're aware that this film is a bit of boosterism staged to make the city look modern and prosperous. Some careful researcher has noted that the many passing automobiles are really a few autos, circling the route of our car. They pass, turn, pass on the other side, and repass on the right.

The primary impression busy Market Street in 1905 offers us is casual chaos. The number of people wandering on and across the street is remarkable. Many stand in the street, looking about them, apparently thinking of something far from Market Street. Most others seem to be in a hurry; it’s Market Street, after all, and business is booming. Something foreign and even disturbing to us that there is so little demarcation between pedestrian and street traffic. Folks continually bolt from one side to the other or stop to talk directly in the traffic flow. The progress of our time vehicle down Market Street is ponderous to us but of little concern to men and women stepping directly in its path, confident that our car or that carriage or even the nimble internal combustion automobiles will make way for them. It’s faintly amazing; no one is knocked down or run over. There aren’t groups pulsing across walkways, timed by signals; that lock-step rigidity is absent.

The phrase “free-for-all” comes to mind, both in the hurly-burly meaning, and in the assured ownership of common space. The hood-banging, automobile-offended New York pedestrian’s shout is poignantly unnecessary on Market Street 1905: “Hey! Hey! I’m walkin’ heah!”

Women pedestrians are relatively rare. What does this tell us about women in San Francisco before suffrage? They are dressed in dark clothes, probably an artifact of horse dung. Dark fabrics hide dirt and stains We would take Market Street to be a filthy place in 1905. Voluminous, long skirts swept near the surface and picked up a rime of powdered horse dung and dust on a rainy day; on a dry day the entire skirt gathered the blowing, ubiquitous product of horse-transport lodged in the cusps between paving stones.

Everyone wears a hat. It’s a breezy day; we occasionally see men clutching their derbies and slouches with both hands.

There is a significant police presence on Market Street. We tend to mistake cops of this era as ridiculous figures because they wear the dark blue solar-topi helmet familiar to us from Mack Sennet’s Keystone Cops, a burlesque of bumbling and incompetent police officers spilling out of a station house in pall-mall pursuit of nothing more dangerous than a scofflaw. But the police on Market are beefy, serious men who look competent and even formidable. They’re men of quick, practical and experienced judgment; Miranda Rights and civil liberties might be science fiction. These are beat-cops assigned to a specific area, with saps and revolvers on their hips, carrying lead-weighted billies. In 1905 San Francisco was still an exotic port ruffled by tong wars, a hustling Tenderloin District, waterfront brawls, and the usual difficulties with alcohol. Cocaine, heroin and opium were sold over the counter so there is no “drug crime” yet. The Indian Wars and the frontier were recent memories, less than twenty years before, but statistics report that riverine or ocean port cities (San Francisco is both) had much more violent crime than the wooliest frontier towns, including the cattle-droving destinations of Dodge City and her sisters in Kansas and Missouri.

There is a vast fleet of street cars. Our straight-line journey encounters dozens of cars on the Market Street line headed in the other direction, and more crossing Market. One crossing car is an electric trolley, powered by overhead wires. Most are unpowered cars; they move as the grip-man hauls on five-foot handles to seize moving, singing cables beneath centerline steel slots on the street, no more than two inches wide, and they brake by releasing the cable and levering-on blocks of elm against tracks and wheels. A grip man must have had prodigious physical strength and endurance.

We see a lot of bicycles on 1905 Market Street, part of the second wave of “wheelmen.” Bicycles were sensible transportation and a political force in the country, perhaps because they freed great numbers of middle-class citizens from the schedules of trains, the expense and responsibility of horse-transport, and the minor but cumulative expense of metropolitan and intercity light rail. Favored politicians visiting cities were accompanied by bicycle parades, large societies of Wheelmen who were something like the League of Women Voters in their pragmatic, progressive views expressed at the polls. Wheelmen were known as technically apt, educated, liberal groups. On our trip we see one cyclist crossing and recrossing the cable car slot only a few yards ahead of our car. Perhaps there was less danger of sinking his front wheel in the slot than it appears.

The day is fine, the mood is buoyant, the city is teeming and fascinating. Young people can watch this fragment of 1905 as a quaint gleam, inconsequential. As we grow older, however, the life and intensity of experience throughout this journey is almost cruel, a memento mori, reminding us that the twinkling moments that are so real in our memories and so full of dedicated life, are evanescent, shadow-play. It requires age to question the real fabric of time, to ask how a moment in this patently false, transparently-manufactured reality-TV opera we inhabit is more real than the sharply realized moments of our past. It seems impossible that those moments don’t still exist, as temporal stair treads to which we might leap if we held tightly to the banister, or if we somehow seized the opposing cable of a Market Street cars going in the opposite direction with a five-foot iron handle and a grip-man’s tenacity.

It helps, of course to be a little crazy. I benefit from this looseness of logic. There is a sandbar on the Chesapeake I inhabited with a woman I loved on the Glorious Fourth of July in the mid-eighties when I was as happy as I can remember being. Our sailboat was drawn up on the beach. The fireworks were reflected in the water and in that exquisite woman’s eyes. We danced on the sand and needed no music but us. We drank sweet Mt. Gay Eclipse rum. She said she loved me, in French. Life seemed as bright and spectacular and blooming as those bursts of light in the sky.

It all went to hell. The exquisite, rare woman changed her mind, in English, and set a lugubrious and devastating chain of events in motion that tore me out of Eden and away from what I most loved. Life was never that hopeful again. But that sandbar evening is so focused in my mind, like a crystal or a hologram of time, that I can’t believe it doesn’t exist at this moment, somewhere.

I watched this Market Street clip a few years ago, during a piano concert at a church in Noe Valley, in San Francisco. About eight pianists were playing, several of them famous stride piano stylists. My friend Jim Purcell was giving his lecture on the evolution of jazz style at the piano. A remarkable man stage-named Hokum Jeeves also played. He and his partner were trying to restart vaudeville and owned a small theater called Hokum Hall in Portland or Seattle. A few of my friends had acts there. Hokum played a cakewalk in ragtime, and then announced that he would demonstrate a lost skill by playing to a silent film as “professors” had in the early part of the last century. They sat at their keyboards – piano or organ – and played extemporaneously, reacting to the mood and action of the film. I remember Mr. Jeeves blending into “A Bicycle Built For Two” as one of the bicycles wobbled across the screen, and fashioning a clanging bell chord as a pedestrian nimbly stepped out of a streetcar’s way. It was enchanting, and it fit this film beautifully.


Braxinoso Speaks

Himself counts his looseness of mind and his past/present confusion of time as virtues. Perhaps they helped him continue an unremunerative profession past logical limits, but they also inflict enormous pain. I've been with him in the dark times when flashes of hope from the past exact a terrible, ironic toll. Trying to look on the bright side, a real virtue of being able to project oneself into another time is the ability to notice small mechanical or social things hindsight often hides.