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By Root 531 0

what was then the absolute center of New York, was a sensation—a brilliant, almost three-dimensional ad leaping out from the drab two-dimensional signs around it. The food magnate H. J. Heinz often looked out over the sign from his Madison Square hotel; in 1898, Heinz took over the space and hired New York’s leading bill-poster, O. J. Gude, to make a new electric sign for Heinz. The sign featured a fifty-foot-long pickle in pickle-green lights against an orange and blue background, a giant white “57,” and the names of Heinz’s most popular products: Sweet Pickles, Tomato Ketchup, India Relish, Tomato Soup, and Peach Butter. Advertisers had learned how to incorporate flashers into signs, so the pickle, the numerals, and the product names flashed on and off in the night sky of Madison Square. A new medium, and a new maestro, were born.

O. J. Gude belongs alongside figures like Adolph Ochs, Oscar Hammerstein, and Florenz Ziegfeld in the pantheon of promotional geniuses who created Times Square—or, rather, the idea of Times Square. Gude was a New Yorker who dropped out of school at seventeen, made a living posting signs, and then over time became the equivalent of an account manager for the food and beverage companies that then dominated outdoor advertising. Gude founded a company of his own in 1889 and soon became one of the leading admen in New York. He was the first to understand the power of the billboard. In a brief essay entitled “Art and Advertising Joined by Electricity,” Gude wrote: “Practically all other advertising media depend upon the willingness or even cooperation of the reader for the absorption of the advertisers’ story, but the outdoor advertising sign asks no voluntary acquiescence from any reader. It simply grasps the vantage point of position and literally forces its announcement on the vision of the uninterested as well as the interested passerby.” It is the mark of a true adman that “literally forces” is meant to express a virtue, not an unfortunate side effect, of the new medium. And of course electric light brought this act of buttonholing to a pitch of aggressiveness unimaginable in the era of the two-dimensional poster. An electric sign was a billboard raised to the power of hypnosis.

Indeed, the earliest accounts of electric signs stress the awestruck reaction of viewers. According to a contemporary description of one of the very first signs on Broadway, “little knots of people used to gather nightly in newly christened Herald Square to watch the glowing eyes in the head of The Herald’s owl wink solemnly at each minute as it crept by, and if you stopped and listened, you could hear little cries of satisfaction go up from the watchers at each repetition of the miracle.” The power of the sign was the power of electricity itself, a force that compelled awe. And the need to compel that sense of awe pushed the signmakers to ever more miraculous acts of creativity. Around 1905, Gude spent $45,000 to erect a sign for the Heatherbloom company in Times Square. As Tama Starr, the author of Signs and Wonders, a history of the electric sign in Times Square, describes it, “The incandescent Miss Heatherbloom walked delicately through a driving rain—depicted in slashing diagonal lines of lamps— concealed by a shell-like umbrella. The gale behind her whipped at her dress, revealing her shapely outline and, above her high-topped shoes, a daring glimpse of stockinged calf.” A few years earlier, men had gathered in front of the new Flatiron Building at 23rd and Fifth (the former site of that first electric sign) to see how the winds swirling around the building whipped up girls’ petticoats. Miss Heatherbloom was a giant, glowing, endlessly visible version of that girl; and men gathered in the street below to watch her, again and again.

The Heatherbloom petticoat girl was the first Times Square “spectacular,” to use the word that quickly came into vogue among sign men to describe a big, colorful, crowd-stopping sign. The history of the spectacular and the history of Times Square are utterly bound up with each other,