Pennsylvania RR New York Poster, ca. 1955
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GUEST:
I collect posters and so I'm always looking for something that I haven't seen before. And so I saw this pop up online, and I immediately snatched it up, because I just absolutely love the imagery here, and the colors of the sunset, the detail on the city lights, and then most of all, I really love the tourists down at the bottom. Their style and the way they dress and the hat, I think it... Everything here really captures probably early '50s New York.
APPRAISER:
This is a travel poster, and it's for the Pennsylvania Railroad. And it is, as you say, from the early 1950s. It's this extraordinary nocturnal rhapsody, this poetic image of New York at night, or twilight, just when everything begins to sparkle. I love it-- you can see the Flatiron Building there, which is my neighborhood. You can see Lower Manhattan. It's the era before the Twin Towers. How much did you pay for it?
GUEST:
$900.
APPRAISER:
And when you bought it for $900, what was your rationale?
GUEST:
When I saw it pop up, and I think it had been available for just a matter of minutes, having not seen it before, I did a very quick search and saw that it had sold six years ago for $15,000, so I thought $900 was an excellent deal.
APPRAISER:
Railroad posters, by definition, had to be printed in great numbers. In order for them to be effective, they would print posters advertising travel to New York and hang them all along the line. So we know that a lot of them were made. And yet, as you have found in your research, and as I can ascertain, very few of these have survived. And in fact, if you do some research on the artist, Harley Wood, he's attributed to having designed two separate posters for the Pennsylvania Railroad: this poster, and then one poster for travel to Philadelphia. I did the same research you did, and I found out that, in fact, at auction, on September 10, 2008, this same image did sell for $15,000, and that is a real comparable. And then I went looking for other comparables, and I found out that in 2002, the same poster sold for $900. One thing they always say in real estate is, "location, location, location." And to be sure, a poster advertising travel to New York City will automatically be worth more than a poster advertising travel to St. Aloysius by the swamp, or some other, less important place. So it does have that, but when you look at the comps for this poster, on September 10, 2008, five days after that, on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and our entire country went into an economic tailspin and it was the Great Recession. 2008 is considered a benchmark year for antique prices. Still today, in 2014, we speak about 2008 as the glory years, and that price, $15,000, really reflects an exuberance in the market that very quickly shattered. Now that said, it is New York, it is this wonderful image, you have the view that, to the best of my reckoning, is from the top of the Empire State Building. There are definitely some condition issues with this poster.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
There are some of, we say, restorations along the folds.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
But given that the poster is so rare and comes up so infrequently...
GUEST:
It's not as big a detriment to the...?
APPRAISER:
If this were mine, I'd probably keep it the way it is.
GUEST:
Really?
APPRAISER:
I would say, in today's market, a realistic auction estimate for this piece is between $4,000 and $6,000.
GUEST:
I would be very happy with that as well, so, great. Well, thank you very much.
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