CHICAGO — Downtown was packed with holiday shoppers 55 years ago, too.
A recently released video from the Chicago Film Archives shows holiday shoppers traversing State Street and other Downtown locales on Dec. 21, 1960. The sidewalks were so packed, police officers needed to direct traffic on crosswalks.
The silent footage is part of the Frank Koza Collection, which contains more than 2,000 films shot between 1935 and 1989, according to Brian Belak, the processing archivist at Chicago Film Archives. Koza was a newsreel photographer based in Chicago.
"It was transferred from a negative and then inverted digitally, so the resultant images are crisp and beautiful," Belak said of the 1960 video.
The six-minute film also shows views of a frozen and sometimes wavy Lake Michigan.
"One thing to note is Koza's eye for framing and composition," Belak said. "Amid the hustle and bustle he also stops to observe the mundane. I particularly like the shot near the end of two shoppers crossing the street. Two dark figures traversing this big open expanse, while the tall buildings loom in the background behind them.
"Another thing that struck me is how similar the Downtown scenes are to today. Swap out the fashions of the clothes and cars, Marshall Field's for Macy's, and you've got basically what you would see if you walked down State Street today: holiday decorations and all."
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