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By Root 550 0

for the spectacular, like the New Year’s Eve celebration, came to define the way people thought about Times Square, while Times Square became the setting for the biggest, brightest, and most innovative signs. The spectacular became the one art form that Times Square, and Times Square alone, gave to the world—to the world, that is, of popular and commercial culture. The reasons for this are principally economic. As the most densely populated crossroads in the world, Times Square offered to advertisers the same commodity that network television later did: eyeballs. An adman writing in 1925 in Signs of the Times, the trade magazine of the sign industry, noted that a million people were said to pass through Times Square every day. “The willingness with which advertisers invest huge sums in long term contracts for this Times Square publicity can be understood when it is stated that this circulation is procured at a cost ranging from one cent per thousand for the illuminated displays to fourteen cents per thousand for the splendid spectacular ‘electrics.’” Many of the people seeing those displays were visitors from foreign countries and other American cities; all the buyers from the big department stores passed through. Thus Times Square functioned as a national or even international advertising medium. As another writer for Signs of the Times observed in 1920, “The primary purpose of the large electric sign of the Broadway type is to send its message on a national scale rather than to try to influence the individual to stop at once and buy a new suit of underwear.”

Times Square also provided the ideal geographic site for this new commercial art form. The triangle whose base was defined by 42nd Street, with corners at the western and eastern edges of Broadway, and its apex at 47th, where the two streets first joined, formed the perfect setting for viewing signs, with unobstructed sight lines in all directions. The low buildings that predominated in Times Square offered an ideal platform for signs. Times Square was poorly suited for practically everything— especially for functioning as a square—but as an amphitheater for the viewing of spectaculars, it was matchless. Perhaps the sidewalks were too narrow to accommodate a crowd of gawkers; then the gawkers simply overflowed into the street. Advertisers realized early on that, thanks to the combination of sight lines and the size and shape of buildings, certain sites had tremendous value: the west side of Broadway at 42nd, the east side between 43rd and 45th, and the point of the triangle, at 47th; they would be occupied by splendid signs for decades to come.

By 1910, more than twenty blocks along Broadway bore electric advertisements. The most astounding and inventive was without doubt the giant sign raised that year on the west side of Broadway at 38th Street— one of the few sites in the Times Square area not controlled by O. J. Gude. The sign featured a Roman chariot race in the style of Ben-Hur, at the time a beloved spectacle of the stage. Seventy-two feet wide and ninety feet high, it was the biggest electric sign ever built. As a crowd in an amphitheater looked on, one chariot raced into the lead while others chased behind, whips cracking and wheels kicking up dust. “The galloping effect,” one historian writes, “was produced by outlining the legs of the horses in eight different positions and using flashing sequences of more than thirty times a second, far faster than the eye can follow, rendering their gallop perfectly.” The effect of naturalism was greater than anything the nascent technology of the moving picture could offer, and far beyond anything ever seen on an electric sign. The race lasted thirty seconds, and then came a wait of thirty seconds before the next race. “Few spectators were content to watch the race only once. When the sign was first turned on, crowds halted traffic, and for weeks a special squad of police was detailed to handle them.”

The sign was not only an aesthetic but a commercial breakthrough. The sign itself was framed by a “curtain,” which