Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Manhattan Bridge Arch — New York Wall Decor

New York built a Roman triumphal arch — and then drove trucks through it.

The Manhattan Bridge has always been the less celebrated sibling. The Brooklyn Bridge got the poems, the photographs, the documentaries. The Manhattan Bridge got the traffic. But its entrance on the Manhattan side is one of the most extravagant architectural gestures in the city — a monumental Beaux-Arts arch modeled on the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris, flanked by a sweeping colonnade inspired by Bernini's at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

It was built between 1910 and 1915, when New York believed its infrastructure should look like empire. By 1927, when Tony Sarg drew it, the empire was in full operation.

Sarg captures the arch doing exactly what it was built to do — funneling the commerce of a city through a Roman gateway. Lumber trucks. Delivery vans stacked with crates. Automobiles threading between them in both directions. A fire engine charges through the center of the frame trailing a plume of black smoke, and scattered pedestrians sprint across the roadway in the way pedestrians apparently always have. In the middle of it all, a single traffic officer stands on a small raised island, conducting the entire orchestra with his arms.

The arch and colonnade still stand at Canal Street. They were nearly demolished in the 1960s and 70s when such things were considered expendable, survived through neglect more than preservation, and were finally restored. Today thousands of drivers pass beneath the arch daily without ever looking up at it.

Sarg looked up — and then looked down, from above, and drew the whole magnificent contradiction: imperial Rome with a traffic problem.

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.