It’s great. I also love video footage from that era as well, capturing the ordinary bustle of the streets. It’s fun when it’s local and you can point to familiar places. One of my favourites is Victoria and Vancouver BC around 1900[0].
Also even the framerate is often wrong as these old movies didn't have consistent framerates. They were hand cranked so the framerate varied quite a bit.
The actual noise levels may have been higher. Regardless, I think the main reason is ventilation. With coal and wood heating streets were designed to act as valleys pushing air through. Also, I hard that old European cities were built with airflow in mind. Whole streets were uninterrupted with trees while some have them.
Also I heard an opinion that Wrocław is one of the most polluted cities because it got a lot of new buildings that break the airflow on main streets.
The background for the regulation was the switch from unregulated wood buildings to requiring mainly brick as building material - there were some major fires before using bricks became the law.
I live just around the corner from one of the photos - the building in that photo hasn't changed much since back then.
But there is green lining added to the river at least. That river looked very sad in 1902.