Of all the choice locations for billboards in America, none beat the display that stretched the length of New York’s Grand Central Terminal and, for four decades, electrified 650,000 train travelers a day with the glories of Kodak color film. Following its 1950 debut, the “Colorama,” as it was known, put on an ever-changing show. Every three weeks, technicians installed a new panoramic scene—at 18 x 60 feet, the world’s largest slide—ranging from the mists of Machu Picchu to the classic car meet shown in this image from the summer of 1961. (That the photos invariably portrayed middle-class heterosexual Caucasians at play was, alas, standard for the times.) Kodak paid $500,000 a year for its choice spot, but after the terminal’s opulent 1913 interior received landmark status, its lease was…
