Rushing crowds, chorus girls, sailors on liberty, New Year’s revelers all moving against a swirling backdrop of flashing neon—this is the enduring image of New York City’s Times Square. Few other places on Earth better symbolize the glitter, excitement and frenetic pace of modern urban life.

How this once-peaceful intersection of two New York City streets—Broadway and Seventh Avenue—grew to become an iconic symbol of 20th-century America is the focus of Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway, a new book by Darcy Tell, editor at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Filled with rare photographs, maps, restaurant menus, hand-colored lantern slides, postcards, magazine covers and other archival images of Times Square, Times Square Spectacular is a visual history that tells the story of this remarkable streetscape and its rise to fame.

Billboard visionary
Tell’s interest in Times Square was sparked in 2000 when the Archives of American Art—a repository of more than 16 million items relating to the visual arts in America—obtained the papers of sign and lighting designer Douglas Leigh. Leigh was the creator of one of the most famous advertisements of all time: the Camel cigarette billboard featuring a huge man’s face blowing gigantic smoke rings out into the air. The sign was a Times Square landmark from 1942 to 1966.

“For nearly 50 years, Leigh was the Big Kahuna of Times Square advertising,” Tell explains. His papers—which include photographs, sketches, scrapbooks, correspondence and other ephemera—were an unusual acquisition for the Archives. “We usually get museum records and the papers of painters, sculptors, illustrators and art dealers,” Tell says. Once she began reading Leigh’s papers, however, she became enthralled.

“The word visionary is greatly overused these days, but he was a visionary,” she adds. His thinking took him beyond just signs above streets. “He viewed New York City as a giant panoramic sculpture.”

Drawing crowds
Piecing together the story of Times Square’s glittering ascension, Tell studied Leigh’s records, which included files for such clients as 7-Up, Amoco, BlueCross-BlueShield, Coca-Cola, Eveready Batteries, Four Roses Whiskey, Fram Oil Filters, Old Gold Cigarettes and Schaefer Beer. Leigh also kept records for displays he created on the Allied Chemical Tower, the Helmsley Building, the Pan Am Building, Grand Central Terminal and even a number of lighted dirigibles that hovered in New York’s night sky after World War II.

Leigh’s career, covered in detail in Times Square Spectacular, “was the culmination of a tradition that began in 1904 when the first electric sign was put up in Times Square,” Tells explains. In 1904, Mayor George McClellan named Times Square in honor of the not-yet-complete New York Times Building. The Times Square subway station opened in 1904 as well. It quickly became New York’s busiest station.

“Times Square was attractive to advertisers because hundreds of thousands of people passed through each week,” Tell says. And, of course, Broadway—the undisputed center of American popular entertainment—drew its share of crowds.

Broadway’s “Great White Way,” so named in the early 1900s because of its halo of incandescent lights, soon spread its illumination into Times Square. By 1925, sign man Oscar Gude, who made his mark by constructing a giant electrified Heinz pickle in Madison Square, transformed Times Square with towering advertisements intended to amaze viewers. These awe-inspiring signs—“spectaculars” in advertising parlance—quickly became famous around the world.

Exclusive restaurants and cabarets, where celebrities and other stylish folk mingled and enjoyed the good life, also drew crowds to Times Square. Fast, showy and champagne-soaked, the scene was irresistible to writers, journalists, playwrights, songwriters and others who sensationalized it in popular culture.

In researching Times Square’s upward trajectory in the early 1900s, Tell combed through collections in the Library of Congress; the Archives Center of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center; the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati; the Theatre Historical Society of America; and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, among other institutions.

Neon
Although businesses in Times Square began to slump in the 1930s with the Great Depression, the advertising signscape that had begun to define Times Square was entering a golden age. Much of this had to do with the growing availabilty of neon lights, which gave sign designers unlimited possibilities to dazzle pedestrians. When the Alabama-born Leigh arrived, the scene became charged like never before.
Leigh’s first spectacular in Times Square was a 1933 advertisement for A&P coffee that featured real steam rising from a 25-foot-tall coffee cup. In the following years his signs became ever bigger and more elaborate, often with intricate animations, such as a winking penguin on a cake of ice for Kool cigarettes.

Many of today’s Times Square signs—the high-tech video screens covering the facades of buildings, for instance—might easily have been made by Leigh, Tell says. “That was the kind of thing Douglas Leigh was imagining back in the ’30s. He just didn’t have the technology to do it.”

Leigh’s ambitions went beyond Times Square. He had ideas of turning the Empire State Building into a giant cigarette billboard and of using the Rock of Gibraltar as a colossal ad for Prudential Insurance. Nothing ever came of these plans, but Leigh did get a crack at the Empire State Building—he designed the enormously popular red, white and blue lighting scheme used on the building for America’s 1976 Bicentennial. 

In the decades following World War II, Times Square hit the skids, but by the late 1990s, it had revived, “once again the  fantastic advertising carnival it had been before,” Tells says. Leigh’s views on its rebirth never made it into print before his death in 1999 (his New York Times obituary dubbed him “The Man Who Lit Up New York). “But he must have been pleased,” Tell says.

Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway will be published in the fall by Collins/Smithsonian Books.