This photograph depicts the corner of Broadway and W. 3rd Street, and it is a glass plate negative that can be looked over with a fine tooth comb for street advertising. There are 17 legible signs representing 11 products and businesses. This image could be used as part of a larger story about industries like patent medicine, ladies millinery, or photo studios in New York. Though some brands can only be found today by looking at old city directories or trade catalogs, other businesses are historically notable. The billboard for the Lafayette Baths at 405 Lafayette Street is arguably the most significant advertisement in this photograph. The Lafayette Baths was one of the known gay bathhouses in 1910s New York City and is an important part of the city's LGBTQ community history.

This photograph shows the corner of Bond Street and Lafayette Street with a wall purposely dedicated to advertising maintained by The N.Y. Bill Posting Co. Many of the legible posters are for foodstuffs, like Carnation Milk and White Rose Ceylon Tea, but the most striking posters are for Broadway theatre. The three stage shows advertised on this wall are “The Third Degree”, “The County Fair” starring Neil Burgess, and “Three Twins” starring Clinton Crawford and Bessi McCoy at the Majestic Theatre. These posters can even be used to date the photograph to ca. 1909 by cross-referencing the shows’ runs in theatre archives. Along with stage shows, there is an advertisement for another form of entertainment that would take the 20th century by storm: film. The poster closest to the street corner is for film pioneer Lyman H. Howe’s “Sicily Earthquake” at the New York Hippodrome. The film depicted the destruction of Messina, Italy, during the renowned 1908 earthquake.

This photograph shows the crowd of people on Broad Street participating in the New York Curb Market, an open-air stock market that was known for evading regulations and allowing New York Stock Exchange brokerages to informally trade in speculative securities. Though the focus of this photograph is the Curb Market, on the left we can spot a bit of road maintenance. Among the paving stones we can see that some enterprising bill poster has decided that the wood barrels around the construction site were a good advertising opportunity! This poster is for the musical Wonderland at the Majestic Theatre on Columbus Circle.

This Kennedy slide only has visible street advertisements for one industry- passenger shipping. Before the development of commercial air travel, people relied on ocean liners and passenger ships to travel across the oceans. This photograph depicts the old “Steamship Row”, a row of brick houses that stood on the south side of Bowling Green that housed the offices of the likes of the Cunard Line, Red Star Line and French Line. The row was torn down during the construction of the Alexander Hamilton Custom House, which began in 1902 and was completed in 1907. The advertising on this building is strictly for the shipping lines in the row, and what is striking in this image is that the Anchor Line (and the neighboring American Line and Red Star Line offices) have suspended signs between the building’s chimneys.