"Fading Memories"

They’re not usually seen as landmarks, but many of the people in our city still feel they should be protected. Unfortunately, NY’s Landmark Preservation Commission has decided not to take action. They will not protect the “ghost signs”. “The commission protects architectural features and the commission does not consider the painted signs a significant feature” Diane Jackier (the Preservation Commission’s spokesperson, said. But these pieces of art of a time gone by, seen on the sides of 19th Century brick-faced factories and apartment buildings, give us a much needed glance at the past. Just as much, if not more so, as the pre-war, nationally protected buildings in New York, Chicago and Seattle. The faded pictures, almost all ads for local mom and pop businesses (as were the norm, opposed to our broad-based, monopolistic economy), are for the most part still visible. Locally recruited artists drew one of a kind, brick based billboards. Hand painted pins and bowling balls advertising ‘McLean Bowl-O-Drome’ in Yonkers “boasting air-conditioning” from 1942, or maybe something simple – a now barely discernable Hearns sign (a then name brand department store) sprawled on the corner of a building.


The individualized artwork is more widespread than one may think. Used from the early 1800’s until the 1970’s (a time even after billboard production was commercialized), the ads can be seen on buildings from Brooklyn and the Bronx, to Manhattan. Most actually aren’t realized until an adjacent building is torn down (many have been uncovered in this manner in Times Square). The signs are uncovered even locally. A ‘Jewel Piano Co.’ sign on Bruckner Boulevard and even the ‘Nemuth Blacksmith Welding’ billboard are still seen when driving down Halperin Avenue in my neighborhood.


But these works are being continuously demolished. Some of the signs are taken off, like the ‘Estey Piano Co.’ sign below the clock on the late 19th Century ‘Clocktower’ building (suggesting back to times before WWI, when every home housed a piano), that’s been rented out as lofts since then and the sign scrubbed away. Other buildings are being knocked down to make room for new construction housing. “Older signs are being preserved, virtually, through the Internet,” Frank H. Jump, a 45-year-old Brooklyn teacher said. He sells his photographs of the dying art online - $75 a-piece. Diagnosed with AIDS 22 years ago, Jump said he ‘sees these signs as a “metaphor for survival”’ and was ‘heartbroken’ to see another taken down (this one a ‘spectral azure sign advertising… laundry whitener, ‘Reckitt’s Blue/ The Purest and Best’’ on a three-astory Washington Avenue building in Brooklyn). “That one hurt the most,” he ended.


Berger, Joseph. “Fading Memories”. Metro Section, New York Times
Saturday, November 5, 2005: Pgs. B1-B2.