World Trade Center Bus Stop Poster, ca. 1987
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GUEST:
In 1986-87, my wife and I lived in the Bronx, and this poster was in the bus stop. One day, I was going in late to work. A guy was out there changing the posters, and I, I went over and kindly asked him, I said, "Listen, what do you do with the posters?" And he said, "Well, uh, we just take 'em back and we destroy all of 'em." I said, "Well, that's a shame." I go, "We love this poster. I'll tell you what, let me buy you lunch." He let me buy him lunch and he gave me the poster.
APPRAISER:
The most important question I can ask you is, what did you guys have for lunch?
GUEST:
I didn't get to have the lunch, unfortunately. But this was back when $20 could still buy lunch in New York.
APPRAISER:
So I'm also born and raised in New York. I was living in New York City when the Twin Towers were built. Uh, they opened to the public in 1973, and they became a global sensation that fixated the imagination of the world. And they're promoting the fact that you can see so much of New York from the observation deck of the World Trade Center. And if you start reading through all the typography, it may not be immediately apparent, these aren't pictures of the Twin Towers. These are typographic structures depicting the Twin Towers. And the words here are all things that you can see from the Twin Towers: food, sights. The artist was Paul Shaw, and it was such painstaking work that it took him 100 hours to do all the handwritten typography, and he had to do it on the floor of his studio. I don't think I need to explain to you or to anybody else what a, what a powerful image, what a powerful symbol the World Trade Center is, not just to New Yorkers, but to people around the world. So we have something that was sort of the textbook example of ephemera, right? It was put up in a bus shelter, and then, as you found out, they were thrown away. Nothing was done with them. My parents' generation remembers where they were when JFK was assassinated. I remember, and my generation remembers, where we were the morning the towers fell. Uh, unbelievably powerful. And this image does that justice-- again, 1988, so 13 years before this was even imaginable. Uh, it is difficult to put a price on something that doesn't have a track record, yet something that we know intrinsically was a multiple. But I do know, from other airline posters and from other New York advertising, that images of the World Trade Center carry a premium because of this, this memory, because of, of, of the powerful nature of the imagery. It's my conservative estimation that at auction, I could see this estimated between $2,000 and $3,000.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
But I've been talking to my colleagues, and we all think that the, the, the sheer emotional appeal could certainly push that price substantially higher. Almost certainly, it would be bought by somebody who is in New York and for whom the piece not just has a graphic appeal, but really has some kind of an emotional resonance.
GUEST:
Wow, that's incredible.
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