New York has always been a city in a hurry to forget itself. Buildings come down, neighborhoods change names, and whole corners of the city disappear so quietly that most people never learn they were there.
Gaslight Prints is my attempt to hold on to some of that. I find old illustrations of New York, restore them, and turn them into prints, so the city that vanished can hang on a wall in the city that replaced it.
Where it started
The first collection comes from Up & Down New York, a book of 24 color illustrations Tony Sarg published in 1926. Sarg drew the city from above and packed every scene with hundreds of tiny people, each one in the middle of something. Grand Central at rush hour. The Stock Exchange floor, three years before the crash. Chinatown. The aquarium inside a harbor fort, with an alligator in an open pool and a pelican on the railing. The Great White Way lit up at night. Washington Market, which once stood where the World Trade Center later rose.
Some of these places look exactly as he drew them. Many don't exist anymore.
If his name sounds familiar, it may be from somewhere else entirely. Sarg is remembered as the father of modern American puppetry, and a year after this book came out, he designed the first giant balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
How it works
I live in Manhattan and run Gaslight Prints on my own. I work from a modern facsimile of Sarg's book: I scanned every plate at high resolution and spent months cleaning them up, removing dust, scratches, and printing dots and correcting the color, so they hold up at full poster size.
Every print is made to order by my print partner on archival matte paper and shipped directly to you. The illustrations themselves are in the public domain. The restoration is what I add.
What's next
Sarg's New York is the first collection, not the last. There's plenty more of old New York waiting to be found, and I'll add it here as I go.
Thanks for stopping by.
Jeff