Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Times Square NYC — New York Wall Decor by Tony Sarg

Times Square before it was Times Square.

The Times Square in your head — the one wrapped in ten stories of glowing advertising, packed shoulder to shoulder, lit so bright the sky disappears — did not exist yet when Tony Sarg drew this in 1927. What existed was a working intersection where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street, busy and chaotic in the ordinary way of a city crossroads, with the New York Times building standing on its wedge-shaped corner and newspaper stands doing a brisk trade in papers from cities across the country.

Sarg drew the crossroads, not the spectacle, because in 1927 the spectacle was only beginning.

His bird's-eye view takes in the whole messy choreography of the intersection. The Times building anchors the corner with its name across the facade. Newsstands lettered "Papers From Other Cities" line the sidewalk, where a man bends to sort his stacks. A green-roofed subway kiosk sits in the middle of everything, the entrance to the station that still bears the square's name. A yellow streetcar runs up Broadway. Early automobiles and a delivery truck thread through, horses still sharing the road with engines. And the crowd does what the Times Square crowd has always done — moves in every direction at once, nobody quite watching where they're going, a hat blown loose and rolling across the pavement.

The square had been renamed for the Times only in 1904, when the newspaper moved its headquarters there and convinced the city to rechristen what had been Longacre Square. The famous New Year's Eve ball had been dropping for barely two decades. The electric signs that would eventually swallow the whole district were arriving but had not yet taken over. Sarg caught it in the brief window when it was still a neighborhood with a newspaper and a subway stop — human-scaled, recognizable, busy in a way you could still understand at street level.

It would not stay that way. Within a few decades the advertising would climb the buildings and keep climbing, the crowds would thicken into the densest pedestrian crush in the country, and Times Square would become less a place than an experience performed at the visitor. But the bones Sarg drew are still there. The subway entrance is still there. The Times building still stands on its wedge. Stand at the corner today, look past the light, and the same intersection is underneath all of it — the crossroads that was there before the glow arrived.

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.