Broad Street, Elizabeth — Commercial America at the Dawn of the Roaring Twenties
Hand-colored postcard, United States (New Jersey) — Circa 1918–1925
This is an American postcard that may have found its way into your collection by happy accident — or perhaps it marks the start of a new one. Either way, it richly rewards close attention, brimming as it is with telling details of early twentieth-century urban life in the United States.
Broad Street, the main commercial thoroughfare of Elizabeth, New Jersey, presents itself here in full mercantile pride. The scene has been carefully hand-colored in the soft pastel style typical of cards published between the end of the First World War and the mid-1920s — a widely used technique in which specialized studios tinted black-and-white photographic prints, either by hand or through photomechanical processes, to produce warm, eye-catching hues. The rosy sky, the ochre and cream façades, the striped awnings: every element is calculated to please the eye and project the image of a thriving, modern city.
In the foreground, the street teems with life in a coexistence that would still have seemed perfectly ordinary at the time: early automobiles — Ford Model T’s or similar vehicles, recognizable by their boxy silhouettes and spoked wheels — share the road quite naturally with a horse-drawn wagon, a lingering remnant of a world rapidly fading away. Two men in dark suits pause on the sidewalk, perhaps exchanging a word of business. Commercial signage dominates the scene: the name “Goerm…” (most likely Goerke’s, a well-known local department store in Elizabeth) is visible on a red-brick building adorned with rounded arches, while at the center of the composition stands the most distinguished building in the row — a neoclassical façade in pale stone, with tall arched windows and an ornate sculptural pediment. Its sign leaves no room for doubt: F.W. Woolworth Co. 5 and 10 Cent Store. The name is an institution: founded in 1878 by Frank Winfield Woolworth, the fixed-price chain store was the forerunner of today’s discount retailers, and its branches lined the main streets of virtually every American town at the time. High on the left, the Stars and Stripes flies proudly, while a large painted wall advertisement — Sterke Kirche Company — is a reminder of the era’s advertising practices, when blank gable walls served as enormous open-air billboards.
