Fascination of Auto Race Bulletins.

Topics:  1908 New York to Paris Automobile Race

The New York Times
March 20, 1908

From Automobile Topics.

All day long and far into the night a crowd fills the sidewalk in front of the Times Building, New York. They watch the progress of the New York-Paris racers, scanning the bulletins posted from time to time, and the little flags representing the various contesting cars, and studying the map of the world on which the course of the racers is traced. It is interesting to note the composition of the watchers. The foreign element predominates. The Latin races—Italian and French—are evidently keenly interested in the toilsome progress of their countrymen across a strange, and climatically, at least, forbidding continent. The crowd does not vary greatly. Some of the spectators stand there patiently, apparently waiting for the appearance of a fresh bulletin. Others are casual spectators, stopping by as they pass or enter the building. Sometimes they get off of the cars, scan the bulletins, and pass on. But the strangest part of it is the almost unvarying regularity of the size of the crowd. Rarely less than 100, it scarcely ever reached double that number, and sometimes it almost seems as if it were the same people gathered there day and night. But it is not.