Dis­as­ters both nat­ur­al and man-made—or in the case of cli­mate change, some mea­sure of both—can reduce built envi­ron­ments to ash and rub­ble with lit­tle warn­ing. In cas­es like the Lis­bon earth­quake, the Great Fire of Lon­don, or the bomb­ing of Dres­den, cities have been com­plete­ly rebuilt. In oth­ers, like the utter­ly destroyed Pom­peii, they lay in ruins for­ev­er, or like Cher­nobyl, become irra­di­at­ed ghost towns. Such events stand as sin­gu­lar moments in his­to­ry, like rup­tures in time, shak­ing faith in reli­gion, sci­ence, and gov­ern­ment.

In the case of the Great 1906 San Fran­cis­co Earth­quake, which destroyed 80% of the city with its esti­mat­ed mag­ni­tude of 7.9, the dis­as­ter also serves as a dire his­tor­i­cal warn­ing for what might hap­pen again if seis­mol­o­gists’ cur­rent grim prog­nos­ti­ca­tions prove cor­rect. In the film above, “A Trip Down Mar­ket Street” by the Miles broth­ers, we see the bustling city just four days before the quake. Film his­to­ri­an David Kiehn has dat­ed this footage to April 14th, 1906. The very con­vinc­ing sound design has been added by Mike Upchurch.

The film shows Mar­ket Street in full swing, Mod­el T’s jostling with horse­drawn car­riages over street­car tracks, while pedes­tri­ans weave in and out of the traf­fic. The four Miles broth­ers, Har­ry, Her­bert, Ear­le, and Joe, left for New York short­ly after shoot­ing in San Fran­cis­co and just missed the quake. They had sent the neg­a­tives ahead, bare­ly sav­ing this valu­able footage. They returned to find their stu­dios, and their city, destroyed by the quake and the near­ly four days of fires that fol­lowed it. They did what any film­mak­er would—started film­ing.

Their footage of the dev­as­ta­tion was long thought lost until it was re-dis­cov­ered at a flea mar­ket. Kiehn dig­i­tized the film and it was recent­ly screened at the Bay Area Edi­son The­ater while on its way to the Library of Con­gress, just before the 112th anniver­sary of the quake. The Miles broth­ers, says Kiehn, “shot almost two hours of film after the earth­quake and very lit­tle of it sur­vives. I think this is one of the longest sur­viv­ing pieces.” It begins with a har­row­ing trip down Mar­ket Street, reduced from bustling city cen­ter to waste­land.

The quake, writes Bill Van Niek­erken at the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle, caused “unfath­omable dev­as­ta­tion… At least 700 are thought to have per­ished, with some esti­mates at more than 3,000…. 490 city blocks were lev­eled, with 28,188 build­ings destroyed. More than 200,000 peo­ple were left home­less.” From this hor­ror, Niek­erkan draws inspi­ra­tion. “San Fran­cis­co, how­ev­er, rose from the ash­es, rebuilt and became a greater city, a shin­ing sym­bol of the West.”

Per­haps the les­son, should sci­en­tists who fore­cast anoth­er major quake be right, is that the city can rebuild again. And in part because of the “wealth of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge” seis­mol­o­gists gained from the 1906 quake, it is much bet­ter pre­pared for such a calami­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Lon­don in Vivid Col­or 125 Years Ago: See Trafal­gar Square, the British Muse­um, Tow­er Bridge & Oth­er Famous Land­marks in Pho­tocrom Prints

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What cities have, over the past cen­tu­ry, defined in our imag­i­na­tions the very con­cept of the city? Obvi­ous choic­es include New York and Lon­don, and here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured his­toric street-lev­el footage of both (New York in 1911, Lon­don between 1890 and 1920) that vivid­ly reveals how, even over a hun­dred years ago, they’d already matured as com­mer­cial­ly, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, and demo­graph­i­cal­ly impres­sive metrop­o­lis­es. At the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, the 6.5 mil­lion-strong Lon­don ranked as the most pop­u­lous city on Earth, and New York had over­tak­en it with­in a few decades. But by the mid-1960s, a new con­tender had sud­den­ly risen to the top spot: Tokyo.

His­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, of course, the word “new” does­n’t quite apply to the Japan­ese cap­i­tal, since as a set­tled area it goes back to the third mil­len­ni­um BC. But Tokyo did­n’t become the cap­i­tal, effec­tive­ly, until 1869 (not that even today’s denizens of Kyoto, the coun­try’s pre­vi­ous cap­i­tal, seem ever to have ced­ed the dis­tinc­tion in their own minds), around the same time that the pre­vi­ous­ly closed-off island nation opened up to the rest of the world. Pro­vid­ed by Ams­ter­dam’s EYE Film­mu­se­um, the footage at the top of the post dates from less than half a cen­tu­ry there­after and con­veys some­thing of what it must have felt like to live in not just a coun­try zeal­ous­ly engaged in the project of mod­ern­iza­tion, but in the very cen­ter of that project.

These clips were shot on the streets of Tokyo in 1913 and 1915, just after the death of Emper­or Mei­ji, who since 1868 had presided over the so-called Mei­ji Restora­tion. That peri­od saw not just a re-con­sol­i­da­tion of pow­er under the Emper­or, but an assim­i­la­tion of all things West­ern — or at least an assim­i­la­tion of all things West­ern that offi­cial Japan saw as advan­ta­geous in its mis­sion to “catch up” with the exist­ing world pow­ers. For the cit­i­zens of Tokyo, these, most benign­ly, includ­ed urban parks: “Japan­ese enjoy to the fullest the plea­sures afford­ed by the numer­ous parks of the Empire,” says one of the film’s title cards. “Uyeno Park, Tokio, is a very pop­u­lar place, espe­cial­ly on Sun­day after­noons.” But then, going by what we see in the footage, every place in Tokyo seems pop­u­lar.

On the brink of thor­ough­go­ing urban­iza­tion, the cityscape includes shrines, wood­block prints, signs and ban­ners filled to burst­ing with text (and pre­sum­ably col­or), and hand-paint­ed adver­tise­ments for the then-nov­el­ty of the motion pic­ture. The Toky­oites inhab­it­ing it wear tra­di­tion­al kimono as well as the occa­sion­al West­ern suit and hat. Young men pull rick­shaws and ride bicy­cles (those lat­ter hav­ing grown much more numer­ous since). Peri­patet­ic mer­chants sell their wares from enor­mous wood­en frames strapped to their backs. Count­less chil­dren, both in and out of school uni­form, stare curi­ous­ly at the cam­era. None, sure­ly, could imag­ine the destruc­tion soon to come with the 1923 Kan­to Earth­quake, let alone the fire­bomb­ing of World War II — nor the aston­ish­ing­ly fast devel­op­ment there­after that would, by the time of the reborn city’s 1964 Olympic Games, make it the largest in the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Oth­er than one or two of the world’s super­cente­nar­i­ans, nobody remem­bers New York in 1911. Plen­ty of liv­ing his­to­ri­ans and enthu­si­asts of the city have paid inten­sive atten­tion to that boom­ing time peri­od when the city’s pop­u­la­tion fast approached five mil­lion, but none expe­ri­enced it first-hand. They, and we, can get no clos­er to it than watch­ing the footage above, orig­i­nal­ly shot by a Swedish doc­u­men­tary team which set out to cap­ture the most cel­e­brat­ed places in the world at the time, a list also includ­ing Nia­gara Falls, Paris, Monte Car­lo, and Venice. The prac­ti­cal­ly immac­u­late con­di­tion of the film high­lights both the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between the street life of New York over a cen­tu­ry ago and of New York today.

Take a look at the tai­lored or tai­lored-look­ing cloth­ing on near­ly every­one, even the one-legged man mak­ing his delib­er­ate way past the Chi­nese gro­cery. Then as now, most New York­ers got around on foot, and since the city’s first sub­way line had opened just sev­en years before, the dom­i­nant pub­lic tran­sit options remained street­cars and ele­vat­ed trains.

In the realm of pri­vate vehi­cles, horse-drawn car­riages had only just begun to give way to motor­cars. (Since 1911 was still the age of silent film, the ambi­ent sound of all this was added lat­er.) “Take note of the sur­pris­ing and remark­ably time­less expres­sion of bore­dom exhib­it­ed by a young girl filmed as she was chauf­feured along Broad­way in the front seat of a con­vert­ible lim­ou­sine,” says the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s notes.

MoMA, which exhib­it­ed the footage last year, also points out famil­iar land­marks: “Open­ing and clos­ing with shots of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, the film also includes New York Har­bor; Bat­tery Park and the John Eric­s­son stat­ue; the ele­vat­ed rail­ways at Bow­ery and Worth Streets; Broad­way sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flat­iron Build­ing on Fifth Avenue; and Madi­son Avenue.” Any mod­ern New York­er halfway inter­est­ed in the city will know all those places, and even if the city has changed in count­less oth­er ways, they’ll sense the very same char­ac­ter­is­tic vital­i­ty in these clips that they feel there today. Will New York­ers of the future have the same reac­tion, to, say, the Japan­ese high-def­i­n­i­tion video demo footage shot on those very same streets in the 1990s? It’ll take about eighty years to find out. We prob­a­bly won’t be here by then, but New York cer­tain­ly will.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1905 Video Shows New York City Sub­way Trav­el­ing From 14th St. to 42nd Street

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.