Time Travel: Subway Ads of the Past

On a recent visit to the New York City Transit Museum, I had the pleasure of re-connecting not only with all the historic rolling stock but also with some of the important cultural icons of my youth—subway car cards.

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and occasionally a bit of verse…

Whether advertising products for home or to wear or to yearn for, they were some of my earliest reading as I traveled the city with my mother in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was like finding old friends, and their elders (the 1930s and 1940s ads, and even a few of their children from the 1960s and 70s.

I thought I’d share some of them here; even if you weren’t a New Yorker, they may be familiar to you from other subways, trolleys and buses, although not this series that featured young career women with interesting lives and seldom a goal beyond marriage and family.

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Soap, and a bit of an appeal to snob values, were common topics…

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Many ads were for food and drink, with sometimes a ‘public service’ spot like this one telling us what most people likely knew…

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Levy’s, which is still around, is better known for its 1960s ads that featured a variety of ethnic stereotypes grinning and proclaiming “You don’t need to be Jewish to love Levy’s Rye Bread. But in the 1940s, the theme was pioneer frontier cowboy American farmer.

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There were quite a few of these in the subways and elsewhere, also featuring Victory Gardens, recipes for ‘making-do’ and grateful soldiers glad that they were being scrimped for.

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Tobacco was not yet a forbidden substance and health danger when these flooded the subways.

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My father smoked Raleighs. I don’t honestly know if he through they were better than any of the others, but we did get a scale, and fishing rods and various other things with the stacks of coupons he kept. Later on the same goal drove those who collected trading stamps at the supermarket. I still have some in a drawer…they might be worth more as antiques.

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In a grosser era, humorous ads like this one for Preparation H were joined by more graphic ads ads for Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, who promised to cure acne and Dr. Tusch, who promised…

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Clothing and cars and a camera that’s “Almost a Kodak.”

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A little ‘domestic science’ and an ad using some of my favorite characters, the cast of Pogo, in a message I have absolutely no clue about. Have you?

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Speaking of cleaning…

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Pez with a decidedly 1960s look, and two striking public service ads…

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