Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Greeley Square El Train — New York Wall Decor

Shopify Description — Greeley Square El Train:

The train that ran above the street for sixty years — then sailed to Japan as scrap.

For most of its life, this stretch of Sixth Avenue lived in shadow. The Sixth Avenue Elevated ran directly overhead — an iron railway built on stilts above the street, carrying trains through the air past the second-story windows of everything beneath it. Tony Sarg drew it in 1927 at Greeley Square, where Sixth Avenue meets Broadway and 33rd Street, with the great department stores clustered nearby and the El threading through the intersection on its iron legs.

Sarg's bird's-eye view captures the strange double life of an El station. Up top, trains pull in along the elevated platforms — one in fresh yellow and red livery, others waiting on the structure that levels off above the rooftops. Below, the street carries on in its own separate world: a big motor bus swinging through the foreground, early automobiles weaving between the El's support columns, a small fenced patch of green holding its own in the middle of the intersection, and crowds moving in every direction beneath the iron canopy. Gimbel Brothers anchors the upper corner — the great department store that drew shoppers to this district by the hundreds of thousands.

The El was loud, and it was dark beneath it, and it dropped cinders and oil on the people below, and for sixty years it was completely indispensable. Built in the 1870s, it carried New Yorkers up and down the West Side for two generations before the subways finally made it redundant.

It came down in 1938. And here the story takes a turn almost too pointed to believe: much of the scrap steel from the demolished Sixth Avenue El was sold and shipped to Japan, where — within a few years — a good deal of imported American scrap was absorbed into Japanese war production. The elevated railway that had carried New York's shoppers and workers and commuters for six decades ended its life on the far side of the Pacific, on the eve of a war that would pull both countries into it.

Greeley Square is still there, at the same crossing, the same small triangle of green holding its ground. But the iron sky overhead is gone so completely that most people walking through today have no idea New York once ran its trains above the street. Sarg drew it while it was still the most ordinary thing in the world — just the way home.

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.