This postcard represents a 1908 artist vision of what the US city of Sanford, Maine, might be like in the future. While the future vision does contain some elements common to modern cities (air traffic and various forms of public transport), it is clearly modelled on the “modern” technology of the day. It is therefore quite different from what Sanford actually looks like today:
Check it out yourself on Google Street View.
Today, there is no tram in Sanford, and the only “Subway” is the fast food restaurant on 1364 Main Street. Sanford also does not have a train station. The distance to New York is about 460 km (just over 300 miles), which would probably take a little over two hours in a typical high-speed train. However, a train journey from Sanford to New York currently takes nearly a full working day: You need to take a taxi to Wells and then a train to Boston, where you can take the subway to a different train station in order to catch a train to New York. No wonder it is cheaper and faster to drive the six hours to New York by car, something that could not possibly have been foreseen in 1908…
Postcards with artist visions of the future were popular in the early 20th century, and some were rather more whimsical than the Sanford example, like this 1905 vision of future transport in the Netherlands:
Sanford postcard by F.C. Philpot, 1908. The “Toekomstbeeld” postcard was published in 1905 by Edgar Schhmidt. Both postcards are currently in the collection of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The streetview-picture of Sanford, taken in 2003, is © 2026, Google.