Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Waldorf Astoria Hotel — New York Wall Decor

The most famous hallway in America stood where the Empire State Building stands now.

Before it was the most famous skyscraper on earth, the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street belonged to a hotel — and not just any hotel. The original Waldorf Astoria was the grandest in the country, and its most legendary feature wasn't a ballroom or a restaurant but a corridor: Peacock Alley, a long marble promenade that ran through the hotel and existed, more or less, so that people could walk down it and be admired. Tony Sarg drew it in 1927, near the very end of its life.

The name was a joke that became a fact. Society women would "peacock" down the corridor in their finest clothes, and crowds would gather to watch them do it. On a busy evening, thousands of people might pass through. It was a runway before runways, a place to see and be seen so concentrated that it gave the English language a verb. Sarg captures it at full performance: soaring Corinthian columns, tall arched windows pouring light across the marble, ornate chandeliers, and the guests arranged across settees and high-backed chairs like figures in a tableau. A woman in a leopard coat holds court near the center. Men in spats lean on walking sticks. A bellhop sweeps the floor while the beautiful people pose. Everyone is watching everyone.

This was the New York of the very rich in the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age — the Vanderbilts and the Astors, the financiers and the showgirls and the politicians, all promenading through the same marble hall. The hotel had stood on this corner since the 1890s, built by two feuding members of the Astor family on adjacent lots, and for a generation it defined what luxury in America looked like.

And then it was gone. In 1929 — just two years after Sarg drew this — the original Waldorf Astoria was demolished. The Empire State Building rose on the site, topping out in 1931 as the tallest building in the world. The new Waldorf Astoria reopened on Park Avenue, where it still stands, but the marble Peacock Alley Sarg illustrated, the original one, the one that gave the language a word, exists now only in photographs and illustrations like this.

Sarg drew a room built entirely for the act of being seen, in the last years before it vanished beneath the most-photographed building on the planet. There is something fitting in that. The corner never stopped being a stage. Only the performance changed.

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.