Ghost Signs

I read an article yesterday about the frescoes of Ancient Rome. It turns out that the majority of the extant works of art of this type are to be found in the Campania region of Italy which includes the city of Naples, in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. That should be a clue as if you know anything about the history of that area, it should dawn on you that these frescoes must be in the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and smaller towns that were destroyed by the massive eruption of that famous volcano in the year 79AD (or CE if you prefer). 

What struck me was the somewhat indelicate way in which the writer of the article described the condition of the frescoes. She said rather matter-of-factly: "they were preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius." This  is true, had those cities not been destroyed, buried by 20 feet of volcanic pumice and ash and left untouched for nearly two millennia, the frescoes would certainly have been destroyed over the ages by perhaps the greatest threat to historical preservation there is, both then and now, development. 

So it turns out the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius was very good news for the archaeologists and art historians, not to mention the tourist industry, but still very bad news for the roughly two thousand people who died in that catastrophe.

What made the excavations of the buried cities at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius so important, was that they uncovered a portion of an ancient civilization that had never been seen before. We knew scads about Roman politics, their religion, their art, language and literature (the rarified kind that is), their philosophy, and their rich and famous. But before the excavations which began in earnest in the 18th century, we knew very little about the vernacular, the lives of everyday people. 

This is understandable because in normal situations, civilizations preserve what they deem important enough to leave behind for future generations, and discard the trite, the banal, and the embarrassing. With the 79AD eruption, the poor people of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the surrounding region didn't get the chance to curate their legacy. Rather, time stood still and everything from the humblest graffiti, to the great temples, were preserved for eternity. Even their pornography survived, so much intact that today, minors need a permission form signed by their parents in order to see it.

Archaeology takes on many forms and isn't only applied to distant history. About one month ago there was an archaeological discovery of sorts in the city of Chicago. Granted it was not in any stretch of the imagination as momentous, profound nor dramatic as the discovery of Pompeii and its neighbors. But it did, as these things often do, crack open a window into our city's past.

On the north side of Chicago at the intersection of Addison and Ravenswood Streets to be exact, the siding of a late nineteenth century frame building was removed, revealing several signs painted on the original sides of the building. One of the signs, an ad for a brand of sliced bread, is in remarkable condition, a tad ironic since it is on the south elevation of the building meaning before the siding was installed, it would have been exposed to hours of direct sunlight every day. The signs on the north side of the building are much more faded, suggesting they were painted much earlier than the bread sign, that could have very well been covered up by the new siding shortly after it was painted. 

Partially covered by building in the foreground, an old ad for soft serve, sliced bread recently uncovered and a shout out to the archaeologists, er, masonry company that uncovered them.

The bread ad in all its glory from below. The best view no doubt would be from a drone, trying to convince my wife to let me buy one. 

A little context, the building that has been getting a lot of attention of late around town.

A particularly beautiful old sign for the Shell Oil Company. Judging from the design of the logo and the graphics, I'd guess it was painted in the 1920s.

A more humble treatment for a local concern.

Unlike the ruins of Pompeii, these ghost signs will not be visible for long as they are likely to be covered up again by new siding. The good news is the siding will preserve these relics of the past for the delight of a future generation when that siding in turn will be removed.  

POST SCRIPT

That last sentence is both right and wrong. The signs are today no longer visible but not for the reason mentioned above. Last week I visited the site, as it is blocks from my mother's current residence, and sadly discovered that the signs were gone. Happily, the signs have been saved, the wood paneling having been removed from the building just in the nick of time before demolition of the building.

The gaps where the siding supporting the ghost signs were removed to be preserved. 

Old signs

An article called Nostalgia's Burning Glow, written by Ginia Bellafonte in the New York Times questions the current trend of preserving old, defunct signs in the urban landscape. The author makes some interesting points asking why we are so fond of these signs advertising products our "enlightened" era finds distasteful or harmful; in her words:

mammoth emblems to industries whose output or methods of production are (or were) anathema to a prevailing value system that holds in relentless contempt anything processed, chemically supplemented, bought in a chain store or intended for ingestion more than 11 minutes after harvest.

Bellafonte uses the examples of the well known Domino Sugar and Pepsi Cola signs along the East River in Brooklyn and Queens respectively, that are prominently visible across the river in Manhattan. While "liberal" New Yorkers gleefully endorsed former Mayor Bloomberg's law banning the sale of "super sized" sugar-laden soft drinks, Bellafonte claims those same people ironically loved the signs and wholeheartedly approved of their preservation, including the great lengths taken to keep them standing.

Not satisfied that people are just thinking inconsistently about these signs and what they represent, the author goes further to define the issue in terms of class struggle. She suggests there is a disingenuous nature to the longings of well-heeled, upper-middle class New Yorkers who are fascinated by these symbols of a more modest world or:

 ...an extension of creative class fetish for the workingman’s life.

About the endangered, roof-mounted Kentile Floor sign that has been a landmark for riders on the F train through the industrial neighborhood of Gowanus in Brooklyn for fifty years, Bellafonte writes:

...there is almost no one belonging to the brownstone Brooklyn renovating class who has ever said, “You know, for the living room I’m just going to forgo the reclaimed zebrawood and retain the integrity of the 1958 vinyl flooring.

Yet according to Bellafonte, the Brooklyn renovating class almost to a person wholeheartedly supports the preservation of the sign above the factory that manufactured vinyl flooring until the 1990s. It would be much better the author chimes in, if those pampered New Yorkers put their time and effort into supporting the cause of the working class people of today, rather than the icons of their ancestors.

Beyond the heavy-handed, class conscious arguments of Ms. Bellafonte which I find somewhat ridiculous, I disagree with the assertion that people are interested in these signs purely out of a sense of nostalgia.  The signs that folks are interested in preserving are examples of great industrial and graphic design, and as objects were crafted with care and an eye for quality that we are unlikely to find in today's throw away world. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, most of the signs and their supporting structures are beautiful objects in their own right, at least in my own opinion.

Our cities are reflections of ourselves and those who came before us. Great cities are not torn down and re-built with each new generation, but evolve over time. Each generation contributing bits and pieces of itself, combined with bits and pieces of other generations, create a gigantic crazy-quilt pattern of architectural and design styles which gives a city its sense of place. Some of my favorite cities like Rome, London, and New York are prime examples of this. All three are layered with centuries' worth of cultures built on top of, or right next to one another.

I said in an earlier post that "advertising speaks volumes about the culture that created it." We think of ancient cities as consisting of austere temples and cathedrals as that is what remains of them. As we've lost much if not all of the ephemeral, low culture of the past, we forget that life went on well beyond those sacred spaces. It's the presence of that low culture ephemera that differentiates a living, breathing city with a city of ruins, a place of the dead.

As someone who is interested in historic preservation, I believe we need to consider holding on not only to the high culture: the great landmarks such as notable buildings and monuments of the past, but also to the low: mundane objects like vernacular architecture, examples of outmoded technology like water tanks, and yes, even defunct signs. Obviously we can't save everything; the rights of property owners must be taken account, especially because it is they who are left to foot the bill to maintain structures that in themselves may not have any commercial worth to them.

While keeping these monuments to the past which have no inherent value may seem frivolous and inefficient, that very frivolity is an indication that a city is alive and well.

Long may those signs live.

Ghost signs

Looking through some old photographs of mine I came across this one made while I was a photography student at the Institute of Design in Chicago. The building on the left with the enormous painted sign is the Reliance Building, one of the greatest buildings in Chicago, perhaps the pinnacle of the late 19th early 20th Century Commercial Style of architecture commonly known as the Chicago School. Today the building, designed by Charles Atwood while under the employ of Daniel Burhham, houses appropriately enough, the Hotel Burnham, and a fancy restaurant called the Atwood Cafe. Between the the Great Depression and its 1999 conversion to the luxury hotel, the building struggled to attract tenants. By 1977 when the photograph was made, it was run down and half empty. Like many buildings of its era, its cornice was removed and its delicate cream colored terra cotta facade was covered with a patina of soot. Despite all that, no one ever questioned the building's significance. A friend once quipped that the Karroll's menswear store on the ground level (where the restaurant now sits) was world famous due to all the photographs of it found in architecture books. Eventually the city of Chicago stepped in and purchased the building with the intent of restoring it to its former glory, which actually happened. Like Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott building a block away, and Burnham and Root's Rookery Building, the Reliance today looks as good as it ever did, in fact, probably better. It is one of the great success stories of Chicago's preservation movement.

Not surprisingly, part of the restoration was the removal of the old sign as well as the fire escape and the enormous smokestack seen in the photograph. Today we're left with nothing but the wall, a great expanse of common brick which contrasts dramatically with the splendid north and east facades of the Reliance. The same thing occurs on the south face of the building. It's safe to assume this lack of attention to detail was due to its builders anticipating that tall buildings would one day butt up to the west and south sides of their building. But that never happened, which is one reason why the Reliance Building continues to capture our imagination as it soars over its neighbors. 

Plain brick walls all over the city served as blank canvases for sign painters and provided excellent revenue generating engines for the owners who created their buildings after all to make money, not to be works of art. Today we look at buildings, the significant ones anyway, quite differently. We cherish them as representatives of the architectural legacy of our city as well as works of art in their own right. As such we feel the temptation to restore them to pristine perfection, to a state that in fact never existed in the past. If you look at historical photographs of Chicago's great commercial buildings of the same vintage as the Reliance, you'll see they were all plastered with advertisements of one kind or other, on their walls, their windows, and in some cases, especially along the great Michigan Avenue backdrop to Grant Park, on their rooftops.

Today most of the signage is gone, lost in the notion of the city planners, preservationists, and concerned citizens, that the visual cacophony created by these advertisements distracts from the glory of the architecture, and cheapens the urban landscape. I'm not so sure I agree. In a sense, great cities exist for the same reasons that the signs do, to attract people. Generating opportunity, (and revenue), is the whole point of the city; take away a city's commercial function and what you have left are beautiful, empty buildings.

You will find great architectural monuments of civilizations past all over the globe. In Greece, Italy and Turkey, places I have been, these monuments have been carefully rebuilt and preserved; their stark white marble facades give us the impression that life in ancient Athens, Rome and Anatolia was devoted exclusively to the worship of gods and the state. What has been lost are the ephemeral aspects of these societies. We no longer for example, see evidence of the ancient world's equivalent of Coca-Cola signs, whatever they may have been, reminding us of the teeming masses going on with their everyday lives, buying and selling their wares (or themselves), in the agora just below the Acropolis or in the Roman Forum. Today it's hard to imagine that the austere ancient Greek and Roman temples were not always stark white, but were originally painted in polychromatic splendor. We imagine the other-worldly sounds of the Gregorian Chant filling the great Medieval cathedrals of Europe (also once painted), not the mooing of cows and the bleating of sheep which was often heard in their early days, necessitating the construction of exquisite rood screens and communion rails that served in part as barriers keeping domestic animals out of the sanctuaries.

Those ancient cities were once filled with everyday life, not very much different from our own cities. It's not the kind of life that makes it into the history books necessarily, but the life of the vast majority of the people just the same.

It's funny that we shun the crass commercialism of our own day, but find infinite interest in the commercialism of the past. Recently on the far north side of Chicago, a building was demolished revealing a sign painted on an adjacent building. The sign for what else, Coca-Cola, remained unseen on that wall for nearly one hundred years, covered up and protected from the sun's damaging rays. When it was revealed last year, it's condition was virtually pristine. "Ghost signs" like this one continuously re-appear in our cities (although seldom in such good condition), and there is a legion of people who document and write about them. A Google search for "ghost sign" plus the name of any city, will return dozens of sites.

Garish as it may be, advertising speaks volumes about the culture that created it. I think it's a bit of a shame that the old ad for Stetson Hats and the shop for big men, probably dating from the forties or fifties was removed from the west wall of the Reliance Building. It provided a visual connection to the past, to a long lost era when men and women dressed up when they came downtown. Its removal is just another example of how much life has been sapped out of Chicago's Loop, now largely the domain of austere office buildings of glass and steel and restored classic masonry buildings whose blank walls have been decreed by the aesthetic police, off limits to anyone with a paint brush.

No, it wasn't a profound work of art and perhaps it was not worthy of gracing the hallowed walls of the Reliance Building. Still, that hat sign and others like it in the Loop, if nothing else, made people who saw it, smile. Unfortunately, the cities in our brave new world of pristine restorations and "starchitects" who have little use for them, have been discarding smile inducing objects at an alarming rate.