Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Grand Central Terminal — New York Wall Decor

Meet me at the clock.

There is no more famous instruction in New York. For over a century, "meet me at the clock" has meant exactly one place: the round information booth at the center of Grand Central's Main Concourse, crowned by its four-faced brass clock. It is where couples have reunited, where strangers have waited, where the entire churning population of the terminal orients itself. Tony Sarg put it at the dead center of his 1927 illustration, exactly where it belongs.

His bird's-eye view takes in the whole vast room. The great arched windows climb the eastern wall, the famous tall windows through which shafts of light fall across the concourse floor. The marble staircases sweep down at the lower edge. And across every inch of the floor, Sarg's crowd does what the Grand Central crowd has always done — moves. Commuters stream toward the platforms. Travelers pause, set down bags, check the time, change direction. Somebody has dropped something. Somebody is running for a train. Hundreds of tiny figures, each one drawn with a few decisive strokes, each one unmistakably a person with somewhere to be.

Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913, and unlike so many of the places in this collection, it is still here — saved from demolition in the 1970s by a preservation fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court, restored in the 1990s to a gleam it may never have had even when Sarg drew it. Stand in the Main Concourse today and you are standing inside this illustration. The windows are the same windows. The clock is the same clock, still keeping time, still the place everyone agrees to meet. The crowd is a different crowd wearing different clothes, but it moves exactly the way Sarg drew it moving, because some things about New York do not change.

This is the rare print in the collection where you can buy a ticket, ride the train, and walk straight into the picture.

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.