August 21, 1901: "What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City" Is Filmed

August 21, 1901, 125 years ago: What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City is filmed. Technically, it's a documentary, but nobody called it that at the time: Then, films using footage of ordinary scenes like this were called "actuality films." It lasts only 1 minute and 17 seconds. But it is one of the earliest truly memorable films.

The camera was operated, and thus the film was directed, by Edwin S. Porter, the main film man at the Edison Manufacturing Company, run by Thomas Edison. He would direct The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and lived until 1941.

It is the dawn of not only motion pictures, which are still black & white, and silent, but of the automobile. The film shows horse-drawn carriages and electric trolleys, and 2 cars.

From the start of the film, a boy stares at the camera, as if he was trying to figure out just what sort of contraption he was looking at.

As the one-minute mark approaches, a couple starts walking toward the camera, and passes over a grating. The air from the grating blows up into the woman's long skirt, billowing it, creating a scene which has been retroactively compared to Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch, filmed uptown, in sound and in color, 53 years later. In this case, the woman laughs, perhaps mildly embarrassed. Unlike Marilyn, she is fully dressed (by the standards of any time, certainly demanded by the standards of that time) under the skirt. The man she is with also laughs.

No harm, no foul.

It has been suggested that the scene was set up and scripted, or else why would she laugh like that, rather than be embarrassed into fainting, as women back then stereotypically did when embarrassed? It's also been suggested that, as in some other Edison pioneer films, the woman is actually a man in drag. The Internet Media Database (IMDb) lists her as Florence Georgie, but no information about such a person is available.

But her man has been definitively identified: Alfred C. Abadie (1878-1950), a camera assistant at the Edison studio, who had appeared in a few of these "actuality films," and would also act in The Great Train Robbery.

Just 16 days after this film was made on 23rd Street, President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo. Eight days after that, he died, and Theodore Roosevelt, born on 20th Street, became President.