Radio City Music Hall restoration poster

Radio City restoration graphics sit at the turn into the 1980s — New York civic/theatre identity before the Los Angeles chapter.

Radio City Music Hall had been closed for more than a year while its 6,000-seat auditorium was restored — original fabrics and carpets rewoven, Donald Deskey’s lobby furniture and the theater seats restored, the staircase mural cleaned, the lighting returned to original specification. In spring 1979 the Hall’s management asked Byrd for the reopening poster.

It was Byrd’s third Radio City sheet after the 1974 New York Art Deco Exposition poster — the one he named as his personal favorite, “an object, like the objects in the show” — and the 1979 A New York Summer poster. The original reopening poster is now rarely found.

Sources: Estate catalog.