Old New York: Grand Central's Colorama Told Us to Live Large

By Mitch Broder

Please set your smartphone to "IMAX," because these photos are 60 feet wide.

Or else set it to "Last Century," because that's where you'll find Coloramas.

You'll find them in Grand Central Terminal, over the East Balcony — actually, blocking the East Balcony — from 1950 to 1990. They will show you that life is happy and thrilling, not to mention wet, and that, wet or dry, it's virtually always photogenic.

And if you didn't spring for those phone settings, you can revisit the Coloramas at Grand Central now, in an exhibition called — well, "Colorama."

"Discotheque," by Neil Montanus, was displayed February 13 through March 3, 1967. At the top, "Waterskiers, Cypress Gardens, Florida," by Hank Mayer, was displayed August 5 through 26, 1968. All the Colorama photos here are Copyright Eastman Kodak Co. and Courtesy George Eastman House.

It just opened at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex (which last year remembered the old Pennsylvania Station). But its photos are actually not their original 18-by-60. The biggest they get is about 2-by-6. At close range, though, that gives you a sense of the biggest thing that people in the terminal got to see, besides their trains.

"Cowboys in Grand Tetons, Wyoming," by Herbert Archer and J. Hood, was displayed October 5 through 26, 1964. 

The original Coloramas were backlit color slides. They were billed as the world's largest photographs. At the least, they were the world's best ad for the company that ruled photography when photography meant things like color slides.

"Saturday Night Family Bath," by Lee Howick, was displayed February 17 through March 9, 1964.

Eastman Kodak Co. sold practically all the film in America in the days before cell phones with IMAX, time machines, and, incredibly, cameras. It installed the Colorama to show millions of travelers that with its cameras, film, and flash bulbs, everything — and anything — could be beautiful.

"Family by Fireplace," by Norm Kerr, was displayed March 15 through May 5, 1965.

In its forty years, the Colorama display held 565 photographs, one every few weeks, and the exhibition sums them up: "They proffered an almost unchanging vision of idealized and perfect landscapes, villages and families, American power and patriotism, and the decorative sentimentality of babies, puppies and kittens."

"Family in Convertible," by Jim Pond, was displayed June 3 through 24, 1968.

In the early years, every picture showed someone taking a picture (or planning to), though, apparently, exemptions were given to waterskiers. In any case, the mission was colorfully voiced by Adolph Stuber, a Kodak ad man who helped to conceive the display: "Everyone who sees the Colorama should be able to visualize them self as being able to make the same wonderful photo."

The exhibition has thirty-six of the wonderful photos, almost all from the sixties, when you could still show a family of five in the bathroom. While most are scenes of America, they include shots of the Taj Mahal, the Matterhorn, Machu Picchu, and Earth itself, as seen from the moon.

There's also a photo of the Colorama display in its Grand Central home (before the East Balcony staircase was built in the nineties renovation).

In its place now is a store, with today's version of a Colorama: a big backlit white apple with a bite taken out of it.

"See You at the Fair," by Donald Marvin, was displayed April 13 though May 4, 1964.

Find your rainbow at "Colorama," through October, at Grand Central Terminal, in New York City.

Pennsylvania Station: The New York City Mistake That Won't Die

By Mitch Broder

The New York City symbol of man’s contempt for himself is Pennsylvania Station.

Either one.

The magnificent original was a monument to civility. It declared us all worthy of elegance. It was demolished.

The sweaty substitute is a monument to debasement. It’s a basement. It’s demeaning. It stands — that is, squats — to this day.

It’s also, incidentally, a testament to my passion: As a kid, I climbed in and out of that dump to get to New York from Long Island. But in its dinginess, it spawned the reprieve of, among other things, Grand Central Terminal. Man’s contempt for himself wasn’t such that he could miss the boat at two train stations.

Farley Post Office.

It’s fitting, then, that the survivor host a remembrance of the casualty. It’s an exhibition called “The Once and Future Pennsylvania Station.” It takes you back to the graceful station — and to its slow, haunting murder. And it takes you forward to its resurrection in the Farley Post Office Building.

I never feel more mortal than when I consider my actual chances of seeing that project completed within my first three lifetimes. But it’s nice to read about — as is the original station, which, as the show reminds us, was “an architectural masterpiece and a major enhancement to the lives of people throughout the region.”

It didn’t enhance every life. It displaced an entire neighborhood, even if it was “an infamous neighborhood with brothels, saloons, casinos, and dancehalls.”  Now we’re short on dancehalls. But the loss was worth it, at least from 1910 to 1963. Then we had no great Pennsylvania Station as well as no dancehalls.

The exhibition includes a few ruins, including a lamp globe, an iron railing, and a glass-block floor tile. But they are disembodied, and don’t evoke much in the way of grandeur. What ended up moving me more were words — words of wisdom and warning, echoing from the regrettable past on the exhibition’s video screen.

 “It’s a building which makes man feel noble, which gives him a sense of space and dignity,” says the art and architecture critic Aline Saarinen. The architect Philip Johnson then completes the thought: “And if you have to — as you will in the future, when they tear it down — come out of the Pennsylvania Station as if you’re in a subway station, how degrading for the entrance to what we like to think of as the greatest city in the world.”

The exhibition continues through October 30th at The New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex and Store at Grand Central Terminal. Admission is free.