San Francisco Art Association on Pine
Street, the site of the first commercial exhibition of moving pictures
in America in 1880. Destroyed by fire November 4, 1894 — the year the movie
business really got started in America.
Peter Bacigalupi’s San Francisco Kinetoscope and
phonograph parlor on Market Street
Courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service,
Edison National Historic Site
On May 4, 1880, at the San Francisco Art Association, Eadweard Muybridge
demonstrated his Zoogyroscope—an illuminated magic lantern device that
projected individual real-motion photos of horses in rapid succession onto
a screen and produced moving pictures. In Chicago, it’s called a
Zoopraxiscope.
On August 24, 1891, Edison files a patent for the Kinetoscope developed by
his employee W.K.L. Dickson. The Edison Company produces the first 25
Kinetoscopes in 1893-94. The machines are housed in wooden boxes with
peepholes for viewing the first Edison short films—and fitted with coin slots.
The commercial movie business in America is underway. The first Kinetoscope
parlor opens in New York City at 1155 Broadway on April 14, 1894 with 10 of
the machines. Chicago gets 10 in May. San Francisco gets 5 in June.
“I closed a deal at once for the five machines they had, paying $2500 for
them. These were set up in a store in the Chronicle Building at Market and
Kearny Streets, and people stood in line to see the pictures, paying a fee
of 10 cents.”
--PETER BACIGALUPI
In the first years of the 20th century, motion pictures escape the wooden,
coin-operated boxes housing Kinetoscopes and are projected onto screens, as
Eadweard Muybridge had shown them a quarter century before.
In 1904, Harry Davis opens a storefront movie house in Pittsburgh with a nickel
admission and calls it the “Nickelodeon.” “The million,” a far more polite
term than the “masses,” have a new form of entertainment in venues created just
for them. San Francisco’s long tradition of elegant movie palaces is about to
begin.
Glen Park Nickelodeon at 2786 Diamond Street, 1926
Pantages Theater, San Francisco
Image courtesy of Ink Mendelsohn
|
