Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Washington Market — Tony Sarg Illustration

Before the World Trade Center, this corner fed New York.

For more than a century, the food that fed New York City came through Washington Market. It sprawled across the western edge of lower Manhattan, a dense, roaring warren of wholesale stalls and retail counters where the city's grocers, restaurateurs, and household cooks came to buy everything the harbor and the railroads brought in. By the time Tony Sarg drew it in 1927, it had been operating on this spot since the early nineteenth century and was one of the largest food markets in the world.

Sarg drew it the way it actually felt to be inside it — total, cheerful chaos.

The stalls stretch back under the market's iron roof, each one lettered with the name of a real proprietor: Sarlenga Fruits & Vegetables. Joseph Rezabek, Sausages. C.W. Sturges, Poultry & Provisions. James Moran. Sides of meat hang from hooks along the back wall. Produce spills from crates and barrels. A woman in a leopard coat carries her purchases through the crush. Someone's shopping bag has burst and the oranges are rolling loose across the floor. A man wheels a barrel of something through the crowd while shoppers, butchers, and delivery boys collide and recover and keep moving. Nobody is still. Everybody is buying, selling, hauling, or haggling.

These were real people. Sarlenga, Rezabek, Sturges — these were real businesses run by real families, and their painted signboards in this illustration may be among the only places their names survive at all.

The market is entirely gone now. In the 1960s the entire district was condemned and cleared to make way for the World Trade Center. The stalls, the iron sheds, the families who ran them, the whole century-old ecosystem of lower Manhattan commerce — all of it was demolished. The Twin Towers rose on the ground where these vendors once sold sausages and oranges, and after 2001 that same ground became the 9/11 Memorial. Few places in New York carry more layers of vanished history beneath them than the few blocks Sarg drew here.

This is what was there first: not a tower, not a memorial, but a market — loud and alive and absolutely certain it would 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.