Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Columbus Circle — New York Wall Decor

The exact center of New York — or at least, the place the city measures from.

Here is a small piece of trivia that New Yorkers love: when a sign says a town is some number of miles from New York City, the distance is measured to Columbus Circle. It is the city's official zero point, the spot from which everything else is counted. Tony Sarg drew it in 1927, and whether or not he knew about the mileage convention, he certainly understood that this was a place where the whole city seemed to pass through.

Columbus Circle is where Broadway, Eighth Avenue, Central Park South, and Central Park West all collide at the southwest corner of the park, organized — barely — into a great traffic rotary. At its center, atop a tall granite column, stands Christopher Columbus, installed in 1892 for the four hundredth anniversary of the voyage, gazing out over a city that did not yet exist when he sailed. Sarg drew him from above, the column rising from its own little island of green while the traffic wheels around it in a slow, honking orbit.

To the upper right stands the USS Maine Monument, the grand sculptural memorial at the park's Merchants' Gate entrance, raised to the sailors lost when the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898 — the event that helped touch off the Spanish-American War. Between the two monuments, Sarg fills the circle with the transit of the age: streetcars curving along their rails, double-decker buses, delivery trucks, early automobiles, and a dense knot of pedestrians flowing across the open pavement toward the park.

Columbus Circle has been rebuilt many times since — the traffic patterns redrawn, the great glass towers of the Time Warner Center rising on its western edge in our own century — but the Columbus monument still stands exactly where Sarg drew it, still at the center, still watching the city revolve around him. The explorer has now stood over this intersection for longer than he was ever a figure of living memory, presiding over a corner of Manhattan that has never once stopped moving.

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.