March 31, 2004
Only in the Old Dominion
Old Dominion Hide and Fur Co., Inc.
Buyers of Hides and Furs
East Cary and South 17th Streets
And the evil denizens of the Canal Club painted their own stuff over ghost-sign goodness. Shame on them. I won't link to their website. They did put a mural on the wall (out of frame to the right, maybe around the corner) that's supposed to look kind of Venetian. I'm all for wall art so long as it stays off ghost signs.
I've been waiting for a cloudy day to get a good picture. The building faces north and is always backlit. On March 29th I had my clouds and a parking space and a train on the trestle. I love the trestles (and rusty hunks of iron on general principle), and trains on only makes them better.
I know absolutely nothing about this building or the late local fur trade. It's fun to imagine cargo barges on the Kanawha Canal, which passes hard on the south side of the building, offloading bundles of furs (raccoon, bear, fox?) floated down from the Blue Ridge Mountains. The furs might have been sorted and then carted over to the train station, one block north, to be shipped off to New York where they will wrap themselves around Fifth Avenue ladies. But who knows how it really was?
223 words | March 31, 2004 07:53 PM | Ghost signs