5 Best Poster Stores In NYC
Dying to liven up your living room, add some pzazz to your bedroom or jazz up your entry way? Want to replace those landscape paintings you inherited from your parents? Need a one-of-a-kind gift? Whatever you're looking for, look no further than the stores listed below, the city's best poster stores. Big or small, four-color or black and white, contemporary or old school, these stores have your poster needs covered. By Jessica Allen.
Since 1987, the friendly folks at Artful Posters in Greenwich Village have helped customers from near and far find the perfect poster. The stock includes vintage ads, arty black-and-white shots, portraits of celebrities, musicians, and athletes, iconic NYC landmarks, and movie ads, much of it hard to find or esoteric. The store will even frame your selection, going so far as to promise to do so in an hour (if your frame is in stock).
Question: What's cool about Chisholm Larsson Gallery in Chelsea? Answer: Everything. For more than 35 years, this store has stocked all kinds of posters in all kinds of sizes. We particularly love its fine, fine collection of movie posters. You can search by actor, director, decade, film nationality, and various other characteristics, all but guaranteeing you'll find exactly what you need or want.
La Belle Epoque specializes in posters from the heyday of advertising (think Donald Draper and cronies, and even earlier). In fact, this Chelsea store sells "only authentic vintage advertising posters made for the original advertisement," from the Belle Epoque itself through the 1900s and into the 2000s, which means you'll be looking at, and purchasing, the real McCoy. No knock-offs here, no way, no how. A collector's paradise!
Philip Williams goes by another name: the Poster Museum, and museum is almost certainly the best word to describe this Tribeca institution. Established in 1973, this store features something like 500,000 different objects, including 100,000 posters from the 19th century to today. Just about every square inch of the walls is covered by cool posters, ranging in subject matter from pin-up girls to vintage travel to World War I-era propaganda to film festivals to old-fashioned ads.
This Soho store earns a spot on this list of its name alone: Posteritati. But it's also got a great inventory, of approximately 9,000 posters, with an emphasis on movie posters from the silent era to whatever is showing at your local multiplex right now. (Follow the store on Twitter for the latest in stock updates.) If you can't make it to the Soho space, the store has a wee spot on the second floor of the IFC Center, one of the city's best independent movie houses.