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Herald Square: the site of NYC’s first film: VIDEO
Check out 34th Street back in 1896 after the jump
Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscopes made it to Manhattan in 1894. Two years later, the first projectable film was shot in Herald Square, inaugurating more than a century of movie making in NYC.
Titled simply “Herald Square,” the film was shot on May 11, 1896 by an Edison assistant, William Heise, according to the New York Times.
“Looking out at the bright spring scene, he could see the energetic heart of a great city, bursting with life,” film historian James Sanders wrote of Heise. “Well-dressed pedestrians mingled with the surging traffic along 34th Street. The elevated train roared periodically along tracks above Sixth Avenue.”
[NYT] – Christopher Cameron