PAINT PASTE PAPER AND PUSH

 

A NOTE IN PREFACE

This is a photographic book about visible ghosts.   In a city where every square foot of ground has a price tag, physical reality is in constant flux.  The city of last Thursday is not the city of this Thursday.  Often, the only tangible remnant of what once was is the written word.    

 

Remarkably, some of those written words, inscribed near or at the site of endeavors now vanished, have not vanished.  A careful look into a shaded alleyway or over an adjoining roof and you will see them.   My goal is to show some of these preternaturally persistent words and phrases, not so much to instruct, but rather to impart a sense of the small magic that still hangs heavy over parts of the metropolis.

 

This book was not written to mourn the passing of so many of the architectural and historical wonders of this city.   That task has already been done by Nathan Silver in Lost New York and by Jose Vergara in Transitions.   It must have been a daunting task.   Within the short space of 175-odd years, New York City has grown from a collection of discrete villages dotting Manhattan Island to a planetary megalopolis of over 8 million inhabitants.  The cost by which something like this happens so rapidly is great.  It has encompassed barbarities like the construction and demolition within a few decades of Old Pennsylvania Station, an edifice justly likened to the Baths of Caracalla. 

 

My mission here is to show the often astonishing polychrome specters of an earlier, and considerably more ephemeral, New York City.  Sign painters once covered New York with colorfully-worked admonitions and enticements.  The photographs were taken between November 1995 and June 2019 at several different elevations; some on the street, others from windows several stories up and some from rooftops; work often involving adventures with both gravity and landlords.   Some computer enhancement of the paintings was done to make the often faded wording and images sharper and more distinct.   

 

 INTRODUCTION 

 

Between two and twenty stories above eye level, the walls of New York City bear paintings: signs, warnings and admonitions.

 

Moving further along the road toward illegibility and oblivion each year, the business concerns of a once young Manhattan still inform an unheeding public of their long-defunct services.   On 8th avenue and 36th street, Meyerowitz and Schrecker offer ladies’ shirtwaists for sale; on 47th and Broadway, a brilliant red masthead invites hungry New Yorkers into a Horn and Hardart Automat gone for four decades; on 18th Street and 7th Avenue, florid Art-Nouveau lettering informs the great-great grandchildren of the intended audience that Hansoms, Victorias and other carriages can be had for nominal rental.   Horses can be stabled on Great Jones street, and on the corner of Duane and Hudson, eager New York entrepreneurs of the newborn 20th Century are exhorted to “Brush Up Business with Paint, Paste, Paper and Push!” 

 

Painted decades ago in brilliant colors several stories high on virtually any available expanse of plaster or brickwork,  the frescoes of old New York once made now dreary vistas of glass, steel and masonry into a riot of colors and images.  At this far shore of the early 21st Century, at a time when some of our favorite realities have become virtual, there is a certain poignancy in beholding the time-ravaged remnants of an age of unique visual immediacy. 

 

Looking at these signs one is invited into a vanished world.   They are a portal into a less antiseptic New York when pushcarts still rolled over the cobbles and wholesale butchers operated on the streets of the West Side.   It was a technologically primitive metropolis which existed for only an historical eyeblink, filled with both animals and humans; megawatt power dynamos and blacksmith shops, international stock exchanges and gypsy camps.  A discordant jangling assault on the senses, the New York City of these paintings pulsed with organic sights, sounds and smells. 

 

Tangibility and immediacy was the message unique to this medium.  Where a large brightly-painted sign announces that Kupferman & Co. make ladies' shirtwaists at 46-52 Broadway, and a bright red arrow three stories tall points to the doorway, there is little reason to doubt that this is where the endeavor in question took place.   Taking this precise vista back 80 years, the clank of machinery and hiss of steam is heard from the 2nd and 3rd floors.   When a civil-war era building on little West 12th proclaims itself: "The New-England Clam Chowder and Biscuit Co.” the smell of yeast and clams invades the imagination and shadows of horse-drawn trucks pass outside the splay awning.   In an age dominated by chain operations, when Walmart boardrooms are located in never-never land; when 90% of the merchandise is made in China; when the closest a patron gets to human interaction is the bored adolescent who rings up items for minimum wage, the confrontational and personal impact of a painting which blares: “We Advertise What We Do and Do What We Advertise Right Here” is undeniable.  

 

There is a mystical and sensuous allure radiated by some of the buildings which serve as canvas for these paintings.  These dilapidated vestiges are strangely human.  They reek of lifetimes, of childhood, seasons, small asymmetries and the ancient unknown.   As the buildings and their frescoed walls are either demolished or redone in tasteful well-financed upscale motifs, the new aseptic tidiness of the street bespeaks nothing so well as the absence of humanity. 

 

The New York City of the 21^st Century has become the stuff corporate research has OK’d for mass marketing.  The ambitious eccentricities of the individual are smothered in an ocean of sophisticated telemarketing.  Every week, one smallholder after another vanishes as the building once occupied receives either an upscale remodeling or the wrecking crew. “Harry’s Bargain Extravaganza” vanishes in the wake of another repetitively monstrous and preprogrammed Caldor.   

 

Here, the world is clean, tasteful, tidy and intriguing as yet another Micky-D’s.   Crumbling vestiges are savaged.  Luchow’s German Restaurant, a fixture just off Union Square since the 1880’s stood abandoned for years until Comp-USA coveted its real estate.   Suddenly, a series of mysterious fires were set by “homeless people” and Luchow’s was obliterated.   The Fiss and Doerr stables which along with the Grammercy Hotel had rested peaceably together,  housing memories and fixed-income tenants for decades stood in the way of Baruch College’s plans and so were destroyed right on schedule despite the impassioned protests of tenants and preservationists. 

 

The list goes on and on, the colors fade, the touch of a skilled hand is obliterated, the intrusion of vigorous greenery uprooted, the arabesques of gentle decay blasted into featureless oblivion.  The stones which entomb years are scattered.   Some of us, stranded on this sparkling precipice of the 3rd millennium pose a question: Once the process is complete; once this city is tastefully reductionist, digitally symmetrical and aseptically clean; what is it that will make people love New York?  The Disney cartel on 42nd St?   What is it that will attract the tourist?  The same CVS or Walmart he has seen a million times already in Des Moines...or lately, in downtown Jakarta?  

 

Our daily consciousness is riveted on multiple screens continuously bleating trivialities and electronic offal; a fretful non-stop billion dollar tsunami of psychologically seductive inducements to tweet nonsense and consume relentlessly.  One wonders, if we didn’t see it on our I-phones and browsers how could we ever learn to really want it? But, these paintings, these signs...didn’t they also mark a relentlessly consumerist society?  Yes, but there was a difference.   Each was unique.  Each was an original and local effort. And they were outside. Our grandparents and great-grandparents could get away from them.   Off the street, in the tenement or apartment, the scene would not change much from day to day.  There would be the same mezuzah on the doorpost, the same crucifix over the bed, the same framed scene on the wall.  Newspapers and magazines might hold alluring advertisements but it was thought neither useful nor wise to continue staring at them and fingering them as a surrogate for reality.

 

To transmigrate to that earlier world, one has to first hear its silence.   Here, now, just for a moment, there is still something left of another world; run-down, ancient, immediate, personal, unique, tasteless.  In these pictures we play a game with time and with reality.   The doorway stands open a crack; the world that was flits in and out of the world that is through these portals in time.  

 

Don’t wait, come, give a look.

 Norwalk Connecticut

18 August 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 WEST MARKET

HAROLD E. HAMBLIN INC. WHOLESALE FISH - ESTABLISHED 1900

HOMESTEAD STEAK HOUSE - NEW YORK'S OLDEST  Est. 1868

 

WASHINGTON STREET, LOOKING NORTH FROM THE INTERSECTION OF LITTLE W. 12TH (ca. 1868 - 1900)

Here is where West Market begins.  

One hundred and twenty-one years ago, Harold E. Hamblin was a bright boy with a bright idea; perhaps the press of the wholesale fisheries markets on Fulton Street was too much for some.  Buyers also came to West Market.   They came for beef and pork, but they might just as well need seafood to stock their restaurants, almshouses and union halls.   Mr. Hamblin would provide the fish in the same locale.

An arrow six stories high still points down into a vanished and uneasy amalgam of fresh fish and broiled beefsteak.   Miraculously, the “Homestead” steakhouse remains, the fish have all been consumed.   Their 2000th generation progeny slide through the Atlantic while a decade-old cascade of rust from an adjoining chimney now follows that faded arrow in its plunge into the teeming melee of sights and sounds that was turn-of the-century #68 Washington St.

Cobblestones are here, pocked and cracked and shiny from shoes and hooves and iron tires and India-rubber tires and synthetic polymer tires. Harold Hamblin’s Fish wagons clattered over these stones on the way uptown and purveyors of delicacies covered them fading in and out of the blink of days and nights in a slow-motion time-lapse ballet. We cannot have the scene without that most common feature of the American landscape, at least a few cars, but we can delete them in the view of memory and see the living and breathing throng which once covered these cobbles. Here, between Gansvoort and Little West 12th was a street market of “dressed meats, fowl, farm produce, fruit &tc.” There were probably flies, and horses, and horseflies. Blood and melted ice and seawater ran between these cobbles. Unappetizing, but probably not as carcinogenic or as toxic as what flows between them now.

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CLAM CHOWDER

NEW ENGLAND BISCUIT CO.

 

Little West 12th St.  Corner of Washington Street (ca. 1875-1915)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the 1880’s this stark, triangular brick building with it’s now-drooping steel awning emanated the rich smells of yeast and baking along with the more earthy aromas of hot soup. Here was some measure of relief for the homesick Bostonian. Vines now cover the yard-high lettering, just barely discernible. The wind rattles the awning. But a hot ladle of clam chowder was once delivered here on the sidewalk. Both the seaman off a schooner tied up off West Street and the businessman here to supervise purchases might along with a yeasty biscuit, get a dose of relief from the cold winds of Autumn 1887. Few tenants remain here. Part of the building lies vacant and empty and hollow. The building itself still resembles a schooner nosing its prow out of a sea spray of vines and verdigris. The building appears poised, confused by the dawn of the 21st century, eager to escape.

 

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BURNHAM’S BEEF WINE (over)

NEW ENGLAND CLAM CHOWDER

 

Little West 12th St., corner of Washington Street (ca. 1885-1915)

Overpainting appears to be a common phenomenon with many of these signs. Since wallspace was rather valuable, one product was simply painted over another. Simple efficient and cheap. Now, time, with glacially slow equanimity has erased just enough of the replacement to make the underlying image visible again. It is a war of the pigments and the elements. Cheap paint jobs might not outlive their application date by a decade...Burnhams’s Beef Wine, an unknown but decidedly unpleasant-sounding concoction leaves this reminder to the progeny of those who consumed this tonic. Was it more useful or delightful in the end than clam chowder? We cannot ask the ghosts who tried both, but considering “Beef Wine” in its more acceptable and familiar appellation: “Bouillon”, we probably are safe in concluding that both were equally good and satisfying on a cold winter’s night. Atrocities of nomenclature such as “beef wine” remind us of the unfortunate need for advertising agencies.

 

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BRUSH UP BUSINESS WITH PAINT PASTE PAPER & PUSH!

 

Corner of Duane and Hudson Streets (1907)

 

 

 

That monstrous hand which reaches up to do just that reminds the entrepreneur that time is wasting, that image is everything. There is no explanation I can find for this painting. No store is advertised, no services are touted. There is just this stupendous warning against sloth and monochromicity. Everyone is reminded that NOW is the time. That the new century is ticking away and a dull and colorless enterprise will be left on the beach as the tide rushes by. It is alarming! Even now, I worry as I look at this astonishing fresco, still vivid and colorful after 114 years. My own business...enough push? Enough paper?

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IRISH TEA “Accept No Substitute For This Trade Mark”  Thos. EPPING TEA CO.

 

Corner of Duane and 10th Streets (Ca. 1885)

 

The entire front surface of #7 Duane Street has been devoted to the merits of Irish Tea. Samplers are warned against imitations. Trademarks are profligate. The vigorous painting job has just about outlived the structural integrity of the building. It was clearly a serious business and one admires the assiduousness of T. Epping and Company. One wonders if Tom Epping had competitors. “Irish Tea” as a trademark is about as generic as “American Food”. Was “O’Malley’s Irish Tea” crushed by the giants at Epping? One wonders.