Antique & Vintage Postcards

A bird's-eye panorama of mid-century modernity at its most kinetic: the International Border crossing at Tijuana, Baja California, packed with a sprawling lot of late-1950s and early-1960s American automobiles — Chevrolets, Fords, and station wagons as far as the eye can see — queued before a sweeping futuristic terminal canopy of white concrete and steel latticework that wouldn't look out of place at a World's Fair. This chrome-era color postcard captures Tijuana at its postwar tourist peak, when the city marketed itself as the "Most Visited City in the World" — a claim printed boldly on the reverse alongside silhouetted imagery of donkeys, sombreros, and dancing figures. The back is unused and pristine, catalog number C19989, making it a clean example of Southwestern border-tourism ephemera from the Kennedy-Johnson era.