The restoration really brings out the high couture worn by everyday women on the streets of Paris. It is easy to understand why women overseas waited anxiously for the "latest fashions from Paris." Women in New York City during this era generally wore formless and severe black dresses, quite unlike the fancy and colorful attire of  Belle Époque-era Paris.

Traffic was brisk in the 1890s.

As you can see, the Avenue des Champ-Elysées was a wild affair in the 1890s. Huge carriages pulled by half a dozen horses carried ten or more people on top, while bicyclists darted around them and hoped they didn't fall off under the horses' hooves.

Rue de l'Avenir.

You will notice a two-speed moving sidewalk. That was the Rue de l'Avenir ('Street of the Future'), a 3.5 km long moving walkway designed as an attraction for the Exposition Universelle of 1900. It was designed in 1893 by American engineers Schmidt and Silsbee and installed on a seven-meter-high viaduct made up of three platforms, two of which were movable. The slower one was going at a speed of 4 km/h and the second at 8 km/h, both rather brisk paces for 1900. In 1888, futurist Edward Bellamy published his novel "Looking Backward: 2000–1887" in which he prophesied that these types of sidewalks would be the highways of the future. Apparently, the Parisians took him seriously and set up this demonstration project. 

It all looks very anachronistic and steampunk to me, like a video game rendition of what 1902 Germany might have looked like with Vincent Price flying around in a giant battleship powered by huge propellers.

Oh, maybe you are wondering as I was, "What does it look like now? Let's make a couple of comparisons. The stanchions were upgraded somewhere along the way so they are wider and sturdier and there isn't a need for as many of them. Perhaps this was done right after World War II when the flying train was partially destroyed by bombing.

Below is a fairly recent capture of Sonnborner Strasse in Wuppertal. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it is at the same bend in the road as the 1902 shot above. Compare them and see if I'm right.

Sonnborner Strasse, Wuppertal, Germany, August 2008 (Google Maps).

Wuppertal in 2008 (Courtesy of Google Street View).

The paddle-wheel steamer Rosedale, which appears briefly in the film, was a regular passage between Manhattan and Rockaway. It sank about a year after this film was taken in a collision with a larger ship.

If you enjoy history as much as I do, you may find this film to be quite evocative of an age long gone by. I also have some classic footage of:

2021