Times Square Movie Ads, The Automat and Other Signs Of the Time
A frozen moment on a sunny winter day in Times Square.
We are looking north from 46th Street to the west side of Broadway. Before looking at the surroundings, check out the tail fins on the passing 1960 Plymouth Savoy automobile heading east.
You may notice the human scale of what Times Square once was. There are mostly low rise buildings housing classic establishments and billboards with simple advertising. There are no glass monoliths with blinding LED lighting as proliferate the area today.
The popular Horn and Hardart Automat is on the left. To the right of the Automat is Playland a pinball and game amusement center that generations of New Yorkers fondly remember. Atop Playland, a billboard is advertising the hit play The Unsinkable Molly Brown at the Winter Garden Theatre. To the right of Playland, another billboard on top of the Forum Theatre advertises Ronson electric razors.
When Was The Photo Taken
The theatre marquee helps us date the photograph.
Carroll Baker is starring in Bridge To The Sun. Opening in October 1961, by late December this film was no longer playing at the Forum. On the next corner is the key advertisement to knowing it is December 1961. The blockbuster El Cid is playing at the Warner Theatre on 47th Street and Broadway.
El Cid opened on December 14, 1961 and would remain at The Warner until August 1962. For this movie, all seats at the theater were reserved and El Cid would do sellout business for the first four months of its showing.
On January 24, 1962 Sophia Loren, star of El Cid, filed a court injunction against Allied Artists and producer Samuel Bronston over this sign, demanding her name be removed. While it appears nothing is amiss, Loren under the terms of her contract was supposed to receive equal billing in all media. Loren’s name was to appear on the same line and same size as co-star Charlton Heston. On the 40 by 15 foot sign, Heston was receiving top billing. Loren would drop her court case on February 19 after the studio promised Loren equal billing with Heston in all future advertising.
Other ads around Times Square are for Esquire shoe shine products; Johnny Walker Scotch Whisky; Canadian Club Whisky and Admiral Television sets.
The Admiral “spectacular” on 47th Street above the “Publicity Building” was first inaugurated in April 1952, and remained all the way until the fall of 1965, one of the many signs mounted by Artkraft Strauss. Their zipper was one of many controlled remotely by equipment supplied by Trans-Lux (famous in some circles for their distribution of made-for-TV “Felix the Cat” cartoons of 1959-60, “Speed Racer,” and “The Mighty Hercules”). The Fedders billboard was one of many mounted by Artkraft’s chief rival, Douglas Leigh. Because Trans-Lux’ system was tied up in an exclusive deal with Artkraft, Leigh had to use other zipper controls for his signs. And as silent film-era animator Otto Messmer also animated many (but not all) of Leigh’s spectaculars as shown on the EPOK (on the northeast corner of 46th and Broadway), there was a “six degrees of Felix” thing going on, given the aforementioned history with his in-his-lifetime unacknowledged creation of the famed cartoon cat, and who distributed the TV cartoons featuring him and his “magic bag of tricks.”
The Canadian Club billboard in this form was up from June 1952 to the fall of 1969. After that, it was heavily modified, the yellow background replaced by a blue backdrop, and a zipper with controls from Time-O-Matic’s “Copy Changer” system added on. That zipper would remain long after Canadian Club vacated “the Square” in 1976-77, and two Japanese whiskies – Suntory and Midori Melon Liqueur – took turns advertising there. That too was under Artkraft’s jurisdiction.
The December 1961 date was also three months before the TWU strike that knocked out Fifth Avenue Coach Lines (one of whose buses – a General Motors “Old Look” – is in this picture) as an operator of a significant portion of the city’s bus routes; when it was all over, they were taken over by a state-run agency that was administered as a Transit Authority (TA) subsidiary, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MaBSTOA).