Thursday, July 31, 2008

Fading Sign

As I've mentioned before, I love to happen upon these old advertisements from the past. Unfortunately I couldn't get very close to this one, but I can see that it was an ad for "nippers" and other types of grooming devices. It makes me wonder what the buildings around it looked like back in the day when it was put up there. I'm glad they haven't covered it up yet.

7 comments:

Blue Wave 707 said...

The sign was probably a lot more attractive back in the day. I guess they were precursors to billboards.

• Eliane • said...

This made me very curious, so I found a little bit more about it. There's a NYT article about these fading signs. They say this about the Griffon sign that you captured:
"Not too far away on the side of 151 West 19th Street is white Italic lettering alongside a sketch of a scissors for Griffon SHEARS SCISSORS. Griffon Cutlery Works, which also sold nail files, tweezers and manicure sets, used the building as its headquarters from 1920 into the 1960's.
The scissors suggest that homemakers typically did their own sewing well into the 1960's, an observation corroborated a few blocks north along Seventh Avenue with a sign for Necchi sewing machines, complete with a drawing of a machine with gracefully curving legs."


And can find an older version of the sign here.

This is so fascinating. It transports you back in history. LOVE it!

Olivier said...

j'adore ces vielles publicités sur les murs de NYC ou de Paris. Bonjour la nostalgie. C'est bien que cela soit préserver.

I love these old advertisements on the walls of NYC or Paris. Hello nostalgia. It's good that it is preserved.

Martha said...

Very interesting. ANd I like Eliane's input into the history too. (This is so much better than going to school!)

marley said...

Its good to see it uncovered. Nice history from Eliane too :)

Anonymous said...

Think of the changes that painted sign has seen, looking down at the city. There is a website that has many photos of old signs like this, silent witnesses. I will let you know the address when I find it again! Jay

John Roberts said...

A wonderful old building! I love finding old painted signs like this. They're hard to photograph because the good ones are faded.