Dazzling Show at Poster House Traces Gotham’s Growth Through Posters

Add a trip to Poster House to your summer bucket list before it’s too late for a fascinating look at New York City through the lens of graphic design, specifically travel posters, mostly from the early to mid-20th century. Aimed at tourists, immigrants and wonder seekers of all stripes, the dozens of works on view were created by artists for cruise lines, rail lines and airlines and advertise the city’s skyline, landmarks and energy in bold, saturated color.

”Wonder City” was a nickname drummed up by marketers in the late 19th century for a number of cities, but mostly New York. In 1914, the term appeared on a souvenir booklet and the name stuck. As show curator Nicholas Lowry, President of Swann Auction Galleries and Director of Swann’s Vintage Posters Department, writes in the handsome catalog, “Phrases like the ‘American Cosmopolis,’ the ‘First City of the World,’ ‘City of Marvels,’ and the ‘Foremost City in the World’ never really gained traction, but the fact that New York was truly a ‘Wonder City’ was apparent to all.”

Wondrous indeed and constantly evolving, as documented here in a succession of images of iconic skyscrapers, monuments and neighborhoods, including defining markers like the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, and the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886 and briefly the tallest structure in the U.S. A building boom followed in the years leading up to and during the Great Depression, producing Art Deco wonders that scraped the sky such as the Chrysler Building (1930), the Empire State Building (1931), and Rockefeller Center (1939), not to mention the forward-thinking New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, produced in four years from 1935 to 1939 to offer hope and a brighter future.

There are not a lot of people to be seen in these advertisements. The appeal is mainly in the architecture and the bright lights and big city streets, offering newbies adventure, escape and, yes, reinvention. In other words, a world of possibility. Lowry, a native New Yorker and poster appraiser for the PBS program, “Antiques Roadshow,” had the idea early on for an exhibit of New York City posters at Poster House, which opened in 2019. It became “a love letter to New York, a fifth year thank you to the great city,” he said in an interview.

About half of the pieces on view are part of the museum’s permanent collection; the rest are on loan from Lowry’s clientele. Some of the items are quite rare. Head to the back right-hand corner of the exhibit space for one of Lowry’s favorite items, a daytime/nighttime view of Gotham by Frederick Siebel, circa 1951, for a small South African shipping company, Farrell Lines.

“They produced the most extraordinary poster of the city...showing all the different kinds of architecture, with Times Square shown as an incandescent burst of color peeking out of the dark canyons of the buildings. It’s just an exceptional modern design, one that is so rare that it is the only copy that I have ever seen. Aside from its rarity, it’s stunningly beautiful,” he said, with the Brooklyn Bridge, the glass-faced UN Secretariat building, water towers and spires completing the picture.

David Klein’s riotous, abstract distillation of Times Square for TWA from 1956 is one of the most famous posters of the city—so famous that it hangs in every guest room of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. Klein appears to be riffing on an earlier image of the Crossroads of the World from 1954, “Fly by BOAC/USA,” Lowry argues, but he takes it to the next level and turns it into “a masterpiece. [Klein’s work] has the trails of the cars, the abstract buildings, the abstract billboards, the hustle and bustle of the city and the bright lights. So it’s really trying to do the same thing. I like to say David Klein must have seen it.”

A tissue paper collage of Times Square, circa 1961, by Charles Robert Perrin for Northeast Airlines is also worth noting. A soft, somewhat blurry rendering, it’s notable for its crowd scene and two NYC perennials:

“You have people from all walks of life–a sailor, a businessman, a society lady, a hippy–but also front and center you have a hot dog cart and pigeons, two iconic New York things captured only in this poster,” Lowry said.

One of the earliest pieces in the show, an ode to Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers featuring the now-demolished Singer Building, promotes service from Glasgow to New York by the Scottish shipping company, Anchor Line. Per the curator about this item from around 1910: “It’s rare. I had never seen it until I started researching this show. It’s an extraordinary architectural view that was almost certainly done from a photograph because of the precision of the rendering. It’s just exquisite. And this comes from a long-term poster geekiness, if I might say—-it’s wonderfully, wonderfully evocative.”

The city romance continues with the show’s signature piece by Harley Wood for the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1952. A very glam couple take in a south view from one of the decks of the Empire State Building, with the city’s streets aglow and looking like rail lines themselves. “The Pennsylvania Railroad was a very large advertiser, and it is so hard to find an original of this poster. And it’s next to impossible to find one in good condition, and the one in this exhibition is as close to original condition as one could possibly hope. So the colors are as if they were just put together yesterday.”

Lowry notes in the catalog that the deck can be seen as the caboose at the back of a train. The image was used for the cover of the book, fitting for a love letter to New York.

“Wonder City of the World: New York City Travel Posters” at Poster House, 119 West 23rd Street (between 6th and 7th avenues), through September 8. https://posterhouse.org/