Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s New York City Hall — New York Wall Decor

The building that has run New York City for over two hundred years.

New York City Hall is one of the oldest continuously occupied government buildings in the United States. It has been the seat of New York City government since 1812 — through the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Jazz Age, the Depression, the postwar boom, and everything that followed. Every mayor who has ever run the most complicated city on earth has worked inside this building.

Tony Sarg drew it in 1927 as part of his illustrated folio of New York at the height of the Jazz Age. He chose his signature bird's-eye perspective — looking down at the plaza from above, the columned facade stretching across the frame, the clock tower rising behind it, striped awnings shading the second-floor arches, American flags flying from the roofline. The crowd below fills every inch of the plaza in the way New York crowds always do — purposeful, scattered, going somewhere.

The Rogers Peet building is visible in the background, a famous Manhattan men's clothier that operated for over a century before eventually closing. The surrounding skyline is recognizable but lower, younger, less sure of itself than it would become. City Hall itself looks almost exactly like this today — same columns, same clock tower, same steps — which is remarkable for a building at the center of a city that tears itself down and rebuilds constantly.

Of all the locations in this collection, City Hall is the one that has changed least. Sarg drew a building that was already over a century old in 1927, and it is still there, still standing, still running the city.

Reproduced from Tony Sarg's New York (1927), a folio of 24 color lithographs capturing the city at the height of the Jazz Age. Sarg — best known today as the father of modern puppetry and the creator of the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon floats — produced these illustrations as a love letter to a city that never stood still.

Available in 12x16 and 18x24. Printed on archival matte paper. Free shipping. Unframed.