Can Label, Broadway Brand Tomatoes, Original NOS Lithograph, Antique 1925

This Broadway Brand tomato can label puts mid-1920s New York City itself behind the fruit — skyscrapers, motor cars, and street life rendered in stone lithograph detail.

• Maker: Broadway Brand
• Materials: Stone lithograph paper
• Dimensions: 11" wide x 4.25" tall
• Origin: St. Louis, Missouri, USA
• Era: Antique, 1925–1926
• Condition: New Old Stock (NOS) — unused, excellent mint condition. Age-appropriate yellowing consistent with period. Please review photos closely before purchasing, as all sales are final.
• Framing: Ideal for a narrow frame — ready to display

The tomato — vivid red, perfectly ripe — is almost beside the point next to the Broadway scene behind it: the majestic skyscrapers of mid-1920s New York, old-fashioned motor cars, and the street life of one of the most famous thoroughfares in the world at its peak. A stone lithograph cityscape that required the same three to four months of plate-making as any other label of the era, applied to a can of tomatoes for a St. Louis grocery company.

Frame it as New York City history, 1920s Americana, or a piece of Jazz Age commercial art — a remarkable cityscape that arrived on a can of tomatoes from St. Louis. A wonderful gift for a New York history enthusiast, a 1920s Americana collector, or a vintage ephemera collector.

The Tibbitts-Hewitt Grocery Company of St. Louis was founded in 1925 and sold within a year to the General Grocery Company, making this label one of the shortest-lived commercial identities in American food history. Its window of production was narrow, and the labels that survived it are finite.

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