»In which the old becomes new again

San Francisco's beautiful, majestic Market St. receives a historic remake through the recreation of a 1905 short film:

... Jack Kuttner attached a camera to a San Francisco trolley and shot black-and-white film as the streetcar rolled east from 10th Street on Market Street. The result, a herky-jerky 20-minute film, is a time capsule of industrial age mobility: Horses pull wagons, motorcars zoom past and newsboys bound around giddily. The Ferry Building, at Market's east end, looms ever larger as the camera-mounted trolley approaches it.
Few copies of Kuttner's film exist, but the Exploratorium, a museum in San Francisco, owns one. San Francisco filmmaker Melinda Stone saw it six years ago; transfixed, she decided to re-create it at its centennial. She is nothing if not patient. Years of planning came to fruition recently when she and a small crew shadowed Kuttner's feat. The result will be shown, along with Kuttner's film and local artists' transportation-related work, at "A Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005," an outdoor screening on Sept. 24 in San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza, sponsored by the Exploratorium.

"I'm hoping that all of that will get people to think about the future and how we can effect change on Market Street," Stone said.

Market Street dissects San Francisco, running northeast-southwest from the close, high-rise-pocked grids of downtown to the climb of Twin Peaks. Plainly, the boulevard has changed through the years, and not always for the best. Some midtown areas have decayed to the point of civic embarrassment. It wasn't always so. Even a half century ago, Stone noted, "that place was hopping. It was more than a shopping center. It was a promenade. It was a place to go and check out the scene and really be alive."