Behold Times Square when it was New York’s premier entertainment district, a festival of neon lights emanating from billboards and theaters.
The postcard carries a 1945 postmark, but it appears to depict Times Square in 1940. Two films released that year, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and The Westerner, with Gary Cooper, blaze across movie marquees.
There’s old Times Square—the 1960s and 1970s sleazy version. And then there’s the real old Times Square, in the early decades of the 20th century, when millions of lights illuminated the city’s primary entertainment district until dawn.
Something about this stretch of New York at this time in history makes it seem exciting, passionate, alive. This Times Square feature streetcars, a Greyhound bus station, cigarette ads . . . and no public pedestrian plaza.
Is this really Upper Broadway? It is if Times Square is your idea of upper—as it must have been to New Yorkers in 1905, about the time this postcard dates to.
Times Square at night is alive and electric: There’s the Times Building, behind it the Hotel Astor, and in the front part of the Metropolitan Opera House.
This photo from 1912 gives a clearer view of the same scene. Here’s a postcard that looks at the Times Building facing downtown in 1911.
This vintage postcard captures a rain-slicked Times Square bursting with color and light at night. It must be 1951; Ten Tall Men and Across the Wide Missouri were both released that year.
The Automat is on the left. Who knew that its heyday as the place to go for machine-dispensed food and drink anytime of the day or night would soon be drawing to a close?
Ephemeral New York 