ABSTRACT

Since the early 1900s, Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was, in fact, a misnomer, as the area was often in blazing colour. From Oscar Gude's Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh's EPOK animation and monumental signs of the 1940s, this chapter discusses Times Square/ Broadway's colourful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation's historical role in the turn to colour in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’ were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked colour, glass, and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery.

KEYWORDS

Times Square, electrical spectaculars, Rainbow Ravine, Douglas Leigh, animation, EPOK

In an address to the Associated Sign Crafts of North America in 1927, sign designer Mel Morris of Baltimore, Luxfer Lens, and Clinton Sign Company (Iowa) described the explosion of neon colours in New York as a kaleidoscopic ‘chrysalis’. Although Broadway and Times Square had long been described as the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, the term was, in fact, a misnomer. From the time the city's first electrical billboard, the Ocean Breezes sign, was illuminated in 1892 on the side of the Cumberland hotel on 23rd street, New York's electrical advertising was a blazing emporium of colour. In 1904, Times Square got its first illuminated sign with Trimble Whisky's clinking glasses on 47th Street.