Another one of those “Trip Down Market Street” videos, this one from the 1930s, pops with color and is upscaled to very realistic high definition.
Every good San Franciscan is familiar with the 1906 film clip “A Trip Down Market Street,” which captures the look and feel of our city’s main drag just four days before the Great Quake. Turns out there are other actuality films of the same kind from different eras. Another one surfaced earlier this year from sometime in the 1930s, and this weekend a video restoration expert premiered an “upscaled” version with full color and 4K image resolution.
Brunos and dames, get ready to flip your fedoras to “A Trip Down Market Street” circa the 1930s, seen below, with detailed digital restoration by a Youtube user named NASS who just does this kind of thing with archival footage from cities all over the world.
The trip begins at the Embarcadero clock tower and merely runs straight up Market Street. Notably, the old Examiner building and marquee pop up at the 3:14 mark, and the video switches to some manner of parade at the end. The colorization is fake, as is the background noise, and the frames per second rate is altered for a more realistic flow.
The footage is indeed real, though, as we can see the original above (with some far more swinging Benny Goodman music in the background).
These digital video restorations are performed with some manner of artificial intelligence tools called “neural networks.” The fellow who restored the original 1906 “A Trip Down Market Street” using neural networks explains it in the above video better than we ever could.
If you want go down a San Francisco archival video rabbit hole, we also recommend found footage of Alcatraz when it was still a prison, the Bayshore Roundhouse in its heyday, or San Francisco in the 1940s, and San Francisco in the 1950s.
Image: NASS via Youtube
