A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from October 05, 2004
A New Yorker’s View of the World
The famous Saul Steinberg 1976 New Yorker cartoon was called "A View of the World from Ninth Avenue," not "A New Yorker's View of the World."

The "view of the world" doesn't show much beyond New York City. This title phrase is also famous.

The idea is not original. In Sidewalks of America: Folklore, Legends, Sagas, Traditions, Customs, Songs, Stories and Sayings of City Folk (1954), edited by B. A. Botkin, on page 22 is "A New Yorker's Idea of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA," by Daniel K. Wallingford, of Woodstock, N.Y. The drawing has Brooklyn appear larger than the states!

http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v42/n11/back.html
Steinberg's most famous composition,
A View of the World from Ninth Avenue,
was The New Yorker cover of March 29, 1976.
This is a bird's-eye view of the city from
Ninth Avenue in a straight line westward,
with space becoming ever more condensed,
and leading, according to American
imagination, to Asia. --Jean Leymarie

The tongue-in-cheek "view of the world"
that Steinberg invented has been copied
by cities, states and nations throughout
the world, often in post-card size. But
the real thing, at 28 x19, stands head and
shoulders above them all. In the show are
three small sketches and two other
full-size versions of the map.

25 November 1978, New York Times, pg. 23:
Most Midwesterners I knew took Saul Steinberg's celebrated New Yorker cover - the one that shows the view looking west from Ninth Avenue into an undifferentiated distance interrupted variously by Jersey, Chicago, Nebraska and the Pacific - to be a wry comment on the traditional insularity of the island-bound New Yorker.

13 May 1999, New York Times, pg. A1:
Saul Steinberg, Epic Doodler, Dies at 84
(Pg. B10 - ed.)
And for many Americans he remained the man who drew the Manhattanite's view of the world, which first appeared on The New Yorker cover of March 29, 1976. It was subsequently copied in knockoffs made for London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Kansas City, Durango, wherever.

"I could have retired on this painting," if royalties had been paid, he once mused. But they weren't, and he didn't. Finally, sick of the many knockoffs, he sued Columbia Pictures for an unauthorized version of the painting used as an advertisement for the 1984 movie "Moscow on the Hudson." A Federal court ruled in his favor in 1987.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/663_FSupp_706.htm
[8] The essential facts are not disputed by the parties despite their disagreements on nonessential matters. On March 29, 1976, The New Yorker published as a cover illustration the work at issue in this suit, widely known as a parochial New Yorker's view of the world. The magazine registered this illustration with the United States Copyright Office and subsequently assigned the copyright to Steinberg. Approximately three months later, plaintiff and The New Yorker entered into an agreement to print and sell a certain number of posters of the cover illustration.


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Names/Phrases • Tuesday, October 05, 2004 • Permalink


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