The pace of Market Street in 1906


If you like historic photos, you've probably seen the video of a trip up Market Street in San Francisco in 1906. And there's so much to see! I can watch it over and over and see new things, but what fascinates me the most is the pace, which is something that has been lost in the past hundred years or so, and I'm hoping will return. I'll see if I can explain, and if the only pace you know is driving and walking, or even riding a bicycle, it may seem mysterious to you.

The best way for me to describe this pace is to say it's how fast a horse walks. No, not gallops, or trots, but walks. It's about twice as fast as a person walks, and it's the pace that this video shows, about 4-5 miles per hour. A human, by the way, walks at about 2 miles per hour.

Of course horses, and people, can speed up, and occasionally in this video there are bursts of speed, the way that someone jogs a bit to hurry to catch a train, or the way that a horse picks up the pace to get out of the way of another vehicle. I don't know what the numbers are, but probably a burst to about ten miles an hour. I'm not talking about Seabiscuit or Roger Bannister here, I'm talking about ordinary horses, and ordinary people.

Like most people born in the 20th Century, mostly what I've known is the pace of a car, the pace of walking, or the pace of a bicycle, none of which are this pace. I discovered this pace for the first time in my life when I learned to jog, and would do a fifteen-minute mile pace, and nowadays I go this pace every morning when I ride my recumbent trike. I breeze past people walking, but I have to get out of the way of bicycles, and certainly cars! It's faster than walking, but I never have the sense that I used to have on a bicycle going faster, and not being able to navigate without it being an athletic event. At the pace that I go there's no danger that I'll run over a pedestrian, and I can easily stop for someone in a car who isn't looking.

As I watch the video, I'm fascinated how people easily move back and forth around each other, and can even accommodate vehicles going the wrong way down the street, or cars speeding up to pass (probably going as fast as ten miles per hour). This is a pace that doesn't require stoplights, or traffic cops. This is a pace that would allow you to be able to hop on a street car while it's moving, and go from walking at 2 miles per hour to riding at twice that.

This is the pace that people have been moving since the time they domesticated horses, and either rode on them or had them pull carts. It's a wonderful pace, and it sure beats walking, but it doesn't require you to stare directly ahead all of the time and never look around. It seems a shame that this pace not only went away, but was forgotten by most people, but that's true of a lot of things in history. I'd like to see it return.
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

Become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more