March 23, 2005

Forgotten NYC. Discovered via Satan's Laundromat, this site shows you all of the stuff that the City That Never Sleeps has dreamt for itself over the years. A creek, alleys of Coney Island, and more!
posted by patita 19 years ago
  • Another site by a fellow bent on photographing disappearing wall ads.
  • And the first site I ever found on the theme--an attempt to document every sign between 14th and 42nd St. in NYC.
  • Ah, patita, you beat me to it. I was gearing up to do a post on painted wall ads, inspired by my trip to Hot Springs last weekend. Good stuff!
  • Ooh, add your links here, mct! I had something else in mind to post, and then it went out of mind... so I posted this. we can make it a repository!
  • This is probably a good thing, actually. I didn't have enough good links to make a decent post yet, which is why I haven't finished it, but here's what little I did have. They're called "ghost signs," and I've loved 'em my whole life. It's funny -- advertising normally annoys the ever-loving shit out of me, but I catch myself thinking of these as art. I suppose it's that someone took the time to paint them by hand, as opposed to the rolled-out plastic assembly-line jobs. Hand sign-painting in general is one hell of an underrated art form, you ask me. But then I've got a Burma Shave license plate on my car.
  • Anybody in the NYC area want to go exploring some of these places this summer?
  • Excellent post! Wish I was there to explore this stuff.
  • I live in LIC, and I gotta say this is an excellent post! It's nice to see a lot of the things I've casually noticed before presented so well. There's definitely not a shortage of *new* things to discover however, as this website cleary demonstrates. *ready to go exploring!*
  • Hey I live in LIC/Astoria too and I love exploring old stuff in my neighborhood. Speaking of old painted signs, there used to be a very old one advertising a wheelwright painted on the side of a building between the Broadway station and 36th street station. They put up a small office building about 10 years ago and it's entirely obscured. I kick myself for not taking a picture of it.
  • Thanks Patita and MCT for the links. Seeing this stuff makes me nostalgic for city livin'. Isn't it strange how all that random signage affects your daily experience of a place? I never thought about the ghost signs in Chicago till I moved away, and now I realize that they were some of the first things I learned to read as a kid... Oh Magikist Lips, where art thou?? *sigh*
  • This guy features signs around Chicago.
  • Bookmarked, Argh. Thanks! BTW, there can't be a nickname more evocative of Chicago than "Slats." Awesome.
  • there can't be a nickname more evocative of Chicago than "Slats." I wonder who this "Slats" character might be? *snickers*
  • excellent finds! we've got picture of a Dr. Pepper ghost ad from Venus, Texas hanging in our kitchen (taken by my husband's mom). I photographed some of the Meatpacking District in NYC before it got gentrified... I should get those scanned and online I guess.