Imagine trying to describe today’s life in Boston to someone born in the year 2100. Someone who has never seen anything as primitive as an iPhone, except perhaps alongside adding machines and typewriters in an antiquarian’s collection of technical curiosities. Someone who likely has never driven an automobile, but perhaps relies on boats and canals to get around a city whose streets have been reclaimed by the sea. Pretty challenging. Then think how much simpler the task would be if you could show that future person a video of your daily life.

Now change those dates and imagine someone from a century ago trying to explain their world to us today. Words and pictures can describe things and places, but they can’t fully impart the experience of being there. That’s why movies of everyday life from the early years of the twentieth century are as fascinating to us as they were to the people who marveled at them more than a century ago.

Moving pictures were introduced in the 1890s. Some of the earliest released to the public depicted scenes from everyday life, and were called “actualities.” (2). Producers soon realized they provided a way for people to tour the world without leaving home, and began making short films of street scenes. A popular way of doing this was to place a cameraman on a streetcar and film as they rode around.

Boston was featured in such a film released in February 1906 (3). This film takes us on a tour through downtown and Back Bay, showing us regular people going about their daily routines nearly 120 years ago.

Boston in 1906

The city seen in the movie is both similar to and different from the one we know today. Boston was then the fifth largest city in the country and growing rapidly, but the population of the metropolitan area was much more concentrated in the city itself than it is today. Certain Boston neighborhoods were among the most densely populated on Earth.

Multistory office, manufacturing and warehouse structures had largely displaced residences downtown. Boston’s first “skyscraper,” the 14-story Ames Building, was completed in 1893. The subway, first in the country (4), had just begun running in 1897. And an entirely new district, the Back Bay, was being filled not only with elegant residences, but also imposing structures for such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Public Library, the Boston Symphony, Harvard Medical School, and M.I.T., that to this day anchor much of New England’s cultural and intellectual life.

John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was mayor; his grandson would be elected president in 1960. King Gillette’s fledgling razor company, which he founded above a fish store on Atlantic Avenue, was about to turn its first profit after selling just 51 razors and 168 blades in 1903 (5).

With so much going on in Boston at the time, it’s interesting to speculate how the filmmaker, Billy Bitner, decided what to include. He was a Boston native and would have been familiar with what Bostonians of the day considered significant. Thus, it’s interesting that none of Boston’s traditional historic sites are included except for a few seconds where we glimpse a corner of the Old South Meeting House. Instead of looking to the past, there appears to be an emphasis on the present and future: Boston as a bustling and sometimes chaotic metropolis, and a place at the forefront of twentieth century innovation.

The opening scene depicts both. People, streetcars and horse-drawn wagons are seen engaged in free-for-all pandemonium. There are no stop signs, lane markers or speed limits (6). Boston didn’t install its first traffic lights until 1925, well after other major cities (7). Intersections are basically survival of the fittest. Today’s Bostonians would feel right at home.

But as the streetcar approaches the Boston Common we also see an entrance to the then-new subway—part of an ambitious scheme to address this chaos as the city entered the new century.

The decision to begin on Tremont Street by the Common is interesting, since traffic problems there had done much to push the city to turn to subways and elevated rail. The situation was said to have been so bad that one could get from Park to Boylston Street more quickly by walking on the roofs of the stalled streetcars than riding on the seats within them. It’s part of the congested zone shown in the 1892 map published by the commission established by the Massachusetts Legislature to promote rapid transit for Boston and its suburbs. The commission’s report led to the decision to place transit both above and below the streets.

What to Look For

In 1906, electric streetcars are everywhere, many having been converted from horsepower only a few years earlier. They run down the middle of the streets, and stop there to pick up and discharge passengers. Horse-drawn vehicles range from delivery wagons to elegant carriages taking the well-heeled about town. A four-horse freight wagon, the period equivalent of today’s eighteen-wheeler, is seen leaving North Station. Only one automobile is clearly visible.

For all the variety in forms of transportation, much less is evident in the people (10). Everyone is wearing a hat. The women are all wearing long skirts and the men neckties. But if the film included sound, we would hear accents from all over the world. According to the 1900 census, about 30 percent of Boston residents were born outside the United States.

Although difficult to make out in the jerky, low resolution movie, signs on the buildings and in the windows tell us a lot about the time and place. Barber shops appear to be everywhere, often on the second floor, and signs advertising haircuts for 15 cents bring home the effect of decades of inflation.

Billiards seems to have been a popular pastime, with many signs on Washington Street advertising such establishments. And then there’s the sign on Washington Street for the Cushing Medical Supply Co. A detailed still photo shows that the “medical” supplies were “medicinal wines.”

Modern viewers might find it strange that some stores had signs announcing they sold goods on credit. But in 1906, credit cards like MasterCard and Visa were many decades in the future, and purchasing daily necessities on credit was regarded by many as consumptive debt and socially unacceptable. Thus, the signs likely attracted attention, but the people entering those shops might have first looked both ways to make sure no one they knew saw them.

Stay tuned. In our next installment, Riding Around 1906 Boston, we’ll climb onboard the streetcar and start rolling!

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Notes

1: Screen capture from Seeing Boston.

2: The term was coined by the Lumière brothers, French cinematographers and manufacturers of photographic equipment. Their first actuality film was a short clip showing workers leaving their factory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_Leaving_the_Lumi%C3%A8re_Factory

3: Seeing Boston, American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. (February 1, 1906) Catalogue H72715. See also, entry in American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films,https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/MovieDetails/29322.

4: New York had a short subway that ran through pneumatic tubes in the 1870s, but it never provided regular service to the general public. See, Mariam Touba, Beach Pneumatic Transit: The 1870 Subway That Could Have Been?, New York Historical Society web site (February 19, 2020), https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/beach-pneumatic-transit-the-1870-subway-that-could-have-been.

5: From Harvard Business School’s page for King Gillette in its compilation of Great American Business Leaders of the 20th Century, https://www.hbs.edu/leadership/20th-century-leaders/details?profile=king_c_gillette.

6: Peter DeMarco, Unsafe at Any Speed, The Boston Globe (October 13, 2009), https://archive.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/10/13/a_century_ago_boston_led_the_way_in_taming_the_states_wild_roads/.

7: Clay McShane, The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 25, No. 3, p. 383 (March 1999).

8: Massachusetts. Rapid Transit Commission, Plan Showing Congested District, City of Boston, March 1892, N.Y. Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/fc0baa70-79fc-0134-36b8-00505686a51c.

9: Detail from City of Boston Archives, Building corner Washington Street and Hayward Place (October 18, 1906), https://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofbostonarchives/14541662943/in/album-72157640329278684/

10: There appear to be few people of non-European descent. African-Americans made up about two percent of Boston’s population in 1900, which was not unusual for northern cities at the time, and Boston’s Asian population was much smaller.

11: Detroit Publishing Co., Washington Street, north from Temple Place, Boston, Mass., Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (c. 1906), https://lccn.loc.gov/2016809700