A warning about fireworks from a 1930s New York public health poster
Fireworks have been a Fourth of July tradition in New York since at least the 1840s, when an annual display of patriotic pyrotechnics was staged over Castle Garden at the foot of the Battery. Across the East River, the city of Brooklyn celebrated Independence Day with a fireworks show in Fort Greene.
Another Fourth of July tradition was for individual New Yorkers to set off firecrackers of their own. Beginning in the 1800s, this holiday ritual continued into the 20th century—leading to the inevitable roundup of next-day newspaper articles covering all the people injured or killed by sparklers and rockets.
“2,600 in City Hurt by Fireworks,” a New York Times headline announced on July 5, 1934. That was “1,500 more than last year injured here despite police drive on bootleg noisemakers,” the article continued. Fireworks injuries included fingers and hands burned or blown off, and eye trauma.
Selling fireworks was already illegal in Gotham; the ban went on the books in 1909. To stem the rise in casualties, the New York City Department of Health publicized the dangers.
With the artistic and printmaking help of the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), the department circulated this red, white, and blue graphic poster (top image) warning people, especially kids, to stay away from firecrackers. (The two boys in the second image, bandaged up at Bellevue Hospital in 1938, apparently didn’t heed the call of the poster.)
Were the posters effective? It seems so. On July 5, 1938, the New York Times noted that unsanctioned fireworks set off throughout the city injured 846 people, mostly kids, down from 1,180 a year earlier.
The firecracker poster is one of many Depression-era posters themed around public health campaigns against everything from syphilis to unsanitary tenements. Click on the links to see examples of these Art Deco-style posters—created by the WPA to address the health problems plaguing midcentury Gotham.
[Top image: Library of Congress; second image, MCNY, X2011.4.11027]
