This Day in History: November 6th, 1928

This Day in History 
November 6^th, 1928

The New York Times begins flashing headlines to pedestrians outside its offices at 1 Times Square, using an electronic news strip that wraps around the fourth floor of the building.

The Motograph News Bulletin  extended 380 feet around the Times Tower and, with a band 5-feet tall, the moving letters were visible from a distance of several city blocks.

When it comes to iconic New York images, you won’t get very far without this one in your vocabulary. The Motograph New Bulletin (‘zipper’ on the street) is one those brilliant signifiers for our modern age to which we, as a culture, probably don’t pay much attention. It’s faded now, like a memory you haven’t thought about in a while, smothered by brighter, louder cultural cues (I’m thinking the Hollywood sign, the rest of Times Square, or even the sneaking reality of Google as a verb).

But what it really did, to me, is provide a gorgeous little platform that news could be delved out to the passerby, keeping them tied to information in a time where you most likely had to seek it out. It’s easy to take it for granted, when our billboards have video and Times Square comes equipped with a massive television screen that packages our world into tidy, two and a half minute clips.

 That’s why it’s so charming, so communal, so enduring. Because chances are, no matter what you were reading, you weren’t the only one. My God, it was probably our first gasp of social media. Yeah, you heard me: Facebook owes a lot to the zipper. You can cull history from the headlines that have been announced here: the Stock Market Crash, the first man on the moon, Nixon’s resignation. How many, I wonder, found out about President Roosevelt’s death standing on Fifth Avenue surrounded by his fellow Americans?

 It’s been the lynchpin of so many cultural short-hands: the sight of the bigger than life text winding around 1 Times Square. I can’t even count how many of those adorable little headlines have shown up in movies, television, and print over the years, telegraphing a central plot point or another. My own favorite, of course, is the announcement of Gone With the Wind’s 1939 premiere, which I remember really well, for some reason…oh yeah. I’m a freak.