The Wonder City at Night: Treidler's New York Central Poster
It is night in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty stands floodlit against the towers of lower Manhattan, green bronze against a blue black sky, her tablet and crown picked out in light, and from a boat down in the harbor a searchlight beam sweeps up and across the heavens in a long golden diagonal. Below, in white letters: NEW YORK, The Wonder City of the World, New York Central Lines.
This is Adolph Treidler again, the same artist as the Bermuda poster in this series, working nearly twenty years earlier: a 1934 lithograph for the New York Central Lines, the great railroad whose trains ran down the Hudson into Grand Central Terminal. Where the Bermuda sheet is all daylight and flowers, this one is a nocturne, and it sells the opposite of an escape. It sells arrival.
From the Collection
New York Travel by Train Poster – Vintage Statue of Liberty Wall Art
Adolph Treidler's 1934 lithograph for the New York Central Lines, printed by Latham Litho.
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The Light in the Harbor
The poster's central invention is the beam. It comes from a floodlight on a boat in the harbor, the way Liberty was in fact illuminated for evening viewing, and Treidler turns it into the composition's engine: a rising diagonal that lifts the eye from the water to the statue to the sky, exactly the path of a traveler's first look at the city. The statue herself is drawn almost photographically, robe folds, crown spikes, raised torch, which makes the flat stylized skyline behind her read even more like a stage set, towers reduced to lit windows and silhouettes.
The pairing was natural. Liberty, dedicated in 1886, was the universal first sight of New York for anyone arriving by water, and the railroads had adopted her as an emblem long before the airlines existed. A poster for the New York Central that shows the harbor rather than a train is making a claim: the railroad is not transport to the city, it is the city's own threshold.
The Wonder City
The phrase under the city's name was the railroad's slogan for its destination, and in 1934 it was not an exaggeration. New York in the early thirties held the world's two tallest buildings, the Chrysler Building and the just finished Empire State, the greatest port in the Americas, and a skyline that had become the international symbol of modernity itself. The New York Central, locked in its famous rivalry with the Pennsylvania Railroad, sold that skyline the way the Pennsylvania sold speed, and its posters, calendars and timetables were a sustained work of civic portraiture.
Treidler was the natural artist for it. The same hand that gave the French Line its ocean liners and Pierce-Arrow its aristocratic motorists understood how to make a machine age subject feel glamorous rather than industrial. Here there is not a locomotive in sight, and the railroad's presence is pure implication: all this, the statue, the towers, the light, is what the train delivers.
Lithography and the Night Sky
The sheet was printed by the Latham Litho and Printing Company of Long Island City, one of the trade houses that turned out America's railroad posters, and night scenes were the lithographer's showpiece: deep blues laid over blacks, windows punched out in warm yellow, the beam printed as a translucent wedge of gold. The Wisconsin Historical Society's museum holds a copy of this poster and dates it to 1934, the heart of the decade when American railroad poster art reached its brief, brilliant peak.
That peak did not last. The Depression thinned the railroads' advertising budgets even as it produced their best art, and after the war the airplane took the poster commissions and the passengers both. The Treidler night view survives as a document of the last moment when the way to arrive in New York, in style and in imagination, was by train, and when a railroad could claim the Statue of Liberty as, effectively, its own station sign.
Grand Central's Railroad
The advertiser behind the poster repays attention. The New York Central was one of the two great trunk railroads of the East, builder of Grand Central Terminal, operator of the Twentieth Century Limited, the most famous train in America, and proprietor of the Water Level Route down the Hudson, whose easy grades it advertised relentlessly against its rival's mountain crossings. A line like that did not buy posters timidly. Its calendar art, its timetable covers and its station posters constituted one of the great sustained advertising campaigns of the century.
Treidler's night view sits near the campaign's summit. The railroad is selling neither speed nor comfort here, the usual currencies of rail advertising, but the destination itself, wrapped in the Statue of Liberty's authority. The unspoken argument is proprietorial: other railroads go to New York, but New York, the wonder city, the floodlit harbor, the towers, is ours. In 1934, with the Depression pressing every railroad in the country, that claim to the city's very identity was the boldest timetable copy of all.
Two Posters, One Hand
Set this sheet beside Treidler's Bermuda poster and the range of the man's career shows itself: the island in daylight, framed by flowers, drawn in 1952 for travelers who would fly; the city at night, framed by a searchlight, drawn in 1934 for travelers who would ride the rails. Between the two posters lies the whole transformation of American travel, and the same illustrator, working in the same flat lit style, marked both ends of it.
