Antique & Vintage Postcards

Searchlight beams slice the twilight sky above the Terminal Tower as Cleveland Municipal Stadium glows warmly along the Lake Erie shoreline in this dramatic dusk-scene linen postcard — a Depression-era vision of civic grandeur that captures the city at the peak of its ambition, when the 85,000-seat lakefront stadium was the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Card number 58 in the same Sapirstein Greeting Card Company series, this C.T. ArtColortone linen by Curt Teich renders the stadium's curved white colonnaded facade reflected in the lake, with the 52-story Terminal Tower illuminated at right, its searchlights advertising Cleveland to all of northern Ohio. Cleveland Municipal Stadium (later renamed and eventually demolished in 1996 to make way for what is now FirstEnergy Stadium) hosted the Indians, Browns, and landmark concerts; this romanticized nocturnal view represents the optimistic civic boosterism of the 1930s New Deal era. Card is unused and pristine.