Bad Art

Another thirty-cent postcard find: the worst illustration of the Woolworth Building I’ve ever seen.

Here’s the postcard version:

And here’s reality in the same era:

Given that the postcard was published by the Success Postal Card Company, which was located in New York, there’s really no excuse for this. It’s a terrible representation. The only possible explanation depends on the publication date: the postcard may predate the actual completion of construction, so it may have bene based on renderings published in the real-estate press.

Since every story should have a moral: don’t trust a document just because it’s old. People made mistakes and cut corners in the good old days the same way they do now.