New York Frame & Picture Co., 261 3rd Ave. at 21st St. (2003)

NEW YORK
FRAME & PICTURE CO
116 FULTON ST
FRAMING OUR
SPECIALTY

The New York Frame & Picture Co. was located downtown on Fulton St., but signs advertising the business appeared all over New York and in every form of media. This one survives on a small building on 3rd Ave. near 21st St. Founded in 1894, NY Frame & Picture began advertising with signs painted on buildings in 1895. These were always in yellow letters with a black background and Frame and Picture Co graphically composed with a curve across the top (higher letters at each end).

The company was known also as the New York Picture Frame Co., the Horowitz Picture Frame Co. and the Maiden Lane Art Co., and it survived until the mid-1990s (in its later days on John St. rather than Fulton). The founder was Charles Samuel Horowitz (1877-1950) an immigrant from Austria as a child. (He opened his business at age 17.) Horowitz was an avid proponent of advertising and ran one of the first ads in the New York Telephone Directory, Feb. 1906 (click for image). A much larger ad appeared in Trow's New York City Directory that same year (click for image).

Interviewed in 1940 (New York Times, 15 June 1940, p. 40), Horowitz said that a great portion of the firm's framing business was on a mass scale, serving clients such as American Tobacco, United States Rubber, National Distillers, Elizabeth Arden, Allied Chemical and New York Central Railway. At that time NY Frame & Picture employed 9 artisans in the basement workshop at 116 Fulton St.

At the time of Charles S. Horowitz's death in 1950 New York Picture Frame had 25 employees in the one-store business.

The company was located at 116 Fulton St. from 1922 until the mid-1960s. Click for image from 1986 of a sign at 116 Fulton reading "New York / Frame & Picture / 116 Fulton / Artistic / Framing / Mirrors & Gifts."

The sign on 3rd Ave. was probably intended to be viewed by rapid transit riders on the 3rd Avenue Elevated, which was taken down in the mid-1950s.

This ad for New York Frame & Picture appeared in Trow's New York City Directory, 1916. At that time their address was 50 Maiden Lane, where they were located from approximately 1913 to 1921/22.

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