About

About Gaslight Prints

New York has always been a city in a hurry to forget itself.

Buildings come down. Neighborhoods change names. Whole worlds disappear between one generation and the next — the elevated trains, the ferry slips, the markets, the grand hotels — cleared away so quietly that most people never learn they were there at all.

Gaslight Prints exists to slow that down.

We find forgotten illustrations of old New York, restore them with care, and bring them back as prints worth living with — so the city that vanished can hang on a wall in the city that replaced it.

Where it starts: Tony Sarg's New York, 1927

Our first collection comes from a single remarkable source: Tony Sarg's New York, a folio of twenty-four color illustrations published in 1927, at the height of the Jazz Age.

Sarg drew the city from above — bird's-eye views packed with hundreds of tiny figures, each one mid-stride, mid-argument, mid-disaster. Grand Central at full rush. The Stock Exchange floor two years before the crash. Chinatown and the old Delmonico's. The aquarium inside a harbor fort, with an alligator in an open pool and a pelican perched on the railing. The Great White Way blazing at night. The Washington Market that once stood where the World Trade Center later rose.

Some of these places are exactly as he drew them. Many no longer exist at all.

If the name is familiar, it may be from a different corner of his work entirely: Tony Sarg is remembered today as the father of modern puppetry in America and the designer of the very first balloons to float above the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade — which he created the same year these illustrations were published. He drew New York the way someone draws a place they love: closely, affectionately, and with an eye for the small human comedy happening in every corner of the frame.

What we actually do

Every print in our shop is reproduced from original period material, carefully restored, and printed on premium archival matte paper built to last. The illustrations are in the public domain — they belong to everyone now — but a high-resolution scan buried in an archive isn't something you can hang on your wall. Our work is the restoration, the curation, and the care that turns a century-old illustration into a print you'd be proud to frame.

We believe the story matters as much as the image. That's why every print in our shop comes with the history of the place behind it — what it was, what happened to it, and what stands there now. These aren't just decorations. They're dispatches from a city that no longer exists.

Where we're headed

We started with Tony Sarg's New York because it's one of the most charming and complete portraits of the Jazz Age city ever made. But the idea behind Gaslight Prints is bigger than one artist or one decade. There are forgotten illustrations of cities all over the world waiting to be found, restored, and brought back to the light.

This is just the first collection. We're glad you're here for the beginning of it.

Gaslight Prints Discovered. Restored. Printed.