Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Great White Way Broadway Night — New York Wall Decor

The only night in the collection.

Tony Sarg spent 1927 drawing New York from above in daylight — the morning rush at Grand Central, the lunchtime crowds at Washington Market, the afternoon promenade at Peacock Alley. Every illustration in the folio is a daytime scene. Every one except this.

This is Broadway on a September night in 1927. The Great White Way at full illumination.

The National Joy Smoke tobacco billboard dominates the upper left corner, a mustachioed gentleman rendered in electric light large enough to see from three blocks away. Below it Monroe Clothes, the Globe Theatre, a Young Men's Democratic Club banner strung across the street. And running the full width of a building on the right — a political campaign banner for James J. Walker, Primary Day September 13th.

Walker is worth knowing. "Beau James" they called him — the most flamboyant, most theatrical, most thoroughly Jazz Age mayor New York ever produced. A former songwriter who showed up to City Hall in spats and a top hat, kept a showgirl mistress openly, presided over the city during its most excessive decade, and was eventually forced to resign in 1932 under a corruption investigation. He was everything the 1920s were. Sarg put his name on the wall of Broadway the same year he drew all of this, and two years before everything fell apart.

In the lower right corner a streetcar reads Chinatown. The crowd fills every inch of the frame. The neon hasn't fully arrived yet but the electricity has — enough of it to turn night into something resembling noon.

The Great White Way earned its name from exactly this. In 1927 this stretch of Broadway was one of the most densely illuminated streets on earth, visible from the Hudson on a clear night. The rest of the city went dark after ten. Broadway did not.

This is the only image in the Gaslight Prints collection where you cannot tell what time it is by the light. It is the only one that feels like it could go on forever.

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.