The Famous "New Yorker" Poster

For copyright reasons I am not going to show a picture of Saul Steinberg's famous 1976 New Yorker magazine cover officially known as "From 9th Ave," but more commonly called "The New Yorker's View of the World." Do a web search and you'll find it.

This magazine cover became a popular poster that you could find everywhere in our area during the late Seventies. Essentially, it depicted how many New Yorkers view the rest of the world, which is to say, that they don't see it in much detail. Or, as Kid Creole and the Coconuts put it "When you leave New York you go nowhere."

Why was the poster so popular? Surely Steinberg has produced many more covers with better artwork. In my humble opinion, the reason was its appeal to our battered sense of pride. NYC was going through a fiscal crisis; crime was way up and many people continued to doubt whether we had much of a future as a town. I recall well an article in the Daily News Sunday magazine entitled "How Come They Hate Us in Omaha?" It featured a cartoon of a bunch of rednecks waving happily as a shipload of hookers, ghetto stereotypes and punk rockers and others sank. Steinberg captured what many of us really felt. And to hell with the hicks.