1906 Post Fire and Earthquake Panorama

Thanks to the bountiful twitter and web feed of Philip Bump, I came across a 5 minute film showing the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake and fire from the Internet Archive. This may have been filmed by Thomas Edison himself. Since WordPress hates iFrame I can’t embed the video, but here’s a GIF and yet another link.

There’s a tremendous 240 degree pan taken on 4th near Natoma, right where Moscone Center is now. It turns out there is a much clearer version of this pan over at the Library of Congress.

Someone at the Library of Congress saved me a tremendous about of time and described the buildings and ruins seen in the pan. However, I got annoyed at scrubbing back and forth in the video, so I just extract screenshots from it and built a panorama, and added the descripions to it. 8000 pixels, so click to zoom.

More later — I actually have work to do today so I don’t have time to integrate this with the buildings you can see in the Sanborn maps from 1905, but you can take a look over at maptcha.org to get your bearings.

Here’s a quick and dirty amalgamation of the 1905 Sanborns from 5th to 3rd between Howard and Market — you can see many of the buildings mentions in the pan. Achtung, crazy big, 80MB.

https://findery.com/burritojustice/notes/may-1906-someone-from-thomas-edisons-group

More later!