Super! Traffic rules appear to have been nonexistent then!
Thanks! That is quite something. Reminds us that 1906 was not all that long ago.
Here’s a film made soon after the quake:
http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2010/10/san-francisco-earthquake-fire/
The Retronaut site also has early color photos and films on other subjects.
And they all look so relaxed and sure of life. Little did they know.
That movie is really cool. My maternal grandmother moved to San Francisco from Pennsylvania as a girl of 18 to live with one of her sisters in order to become a nurse. They wound up in Oakland because of the great quake, and she became a milliner instead. There was a glimpse of a lady crossing the street (to catch one of those streetcars) wearing an elaborate hat. Grandma used to make hats like those until the young gentleman who courted her whisked her away on a New Year’s Eve elopement, and they married and honeymooned at the Cliff House in San Francisco several years after the quake.
All those men running around in the street remind me of my grandfather. He wore those same clothes until he died in the mid 1960s. Never gave up the highbuttoned shoes and stiff collars. And he always wanted 2 pockets on the front of his shirts. My aunt used to buy separate pockets at the notions counter in a department store and sew them on his shirts to get him double pocket shirts. He insisted on that. I never saw him in “casual” clothes — always suit, tie, hat, & overcoat in the winter.
He was a real estate broker and invester who bought and sold property throughout the Central Valley of CA and in Oakland and San Francisco until the day he died.