100 word minimum

Ghost road

I was driving over to Southside today and found myself driving on a ghost road. They're resurfacing Chippenham Parkway right now. It's a four lane divided highway now, but I can remember when this stretch, between the expressway and Hugenot, was a two lane road. The northbound side, which I was driving on, was the original road. The top layer of asphalt has been scraped off, preparatory to a new layer being spread on, and the surface of the old road is temporarily visible. You can still see the old lines, the double yellow line running down the center of the road. I am amazed by the staying power of paint.

Condemned

On North 25th near Leigh Street

North 25th is being slowly brought back as the "commercial corridor" through the neighborhood. To the right of these houses is a graceful Masonic Temple, to the left is a nicely restored house. Across the street is a humongous church. I'm hoping that the proximity of not-falling-down buildings will help pull these back from the brink, though the tree growing out of the frame house is not hopeful. Well, the tree is looking pretty happy, but the house? Not so much.

When I opened my eyes this morning, and for the rest of the day, I heard the beep-beep and not quite infrasonic rumble of heavy machinery somewhere within a few blocks. I've learned to recognize those sounds as the signal that the city is knocking something down. In the next few days I'll notice an empty, straw-covered lot and try to recall what used to be there.

This past week a little one-story frame storefront on Clay, boarded up since I can remember, disappeared. For the longest time it had a Pepsi sign peeking over where one of the windows wasn't totally covered: a bottle-cap in a field of yellow painted on glass. We'd go by and every time I'd smile at it and think how amazing it was that the glass hadn't been smashed in all these years. Then, one day it was. And not so long after, the whole building was gone.

Another building on Leigh is gone within the last month or so. It was a two-story frame storefront covered with disintegrating asphalt shingle in the popular ghetto brick pattern. There was a sign on the side, lettering in bright blue electrical tape: Bethel Holy Church. Now it's a vacant lot and the only thing left is the phone-less phone on a stick sort of thing projecting from the sidewalk in front of where the building used to be.

These things that are gone are gone. It's not like they looked all that great, though the boat in the lot on Leigh? With the trees growing out of it? I like to look at them. It's fun to imagine them getting fixed up and turned into a church, a shop, a house where people live and plant flowers out front. But I can't do that once the city knocks them down.

City of smells

Hygrade Food Products Corporation
South 15th and East Cary Streets

Our adventure for the day was more photography, this time of the Hygrade buildings down in Shockoe Bottom. Click on the picture to see more pictures (or not, hey, it's your call).

But this got me thinking, after we went into the smokehouse part of the complex which still smells of smoked ham, about smells. This part of town now has city smells, mostly car and truck exhaust. What did it smell like a century ago?

We have this smoked ham plant, right across the street from a tobacco facility and right down the road from Tobacco Row. There's an old livery stable a few blocks away, and a saddler, and any number of feed distributors, so we can make some assumptions about horses. Coffee distributors. A train station. A canal (which is kind of stinky now). There were ironworks a short way up the river.

I'm trying to imagine layers of smells: coal smoke, ham smoke, manure, tobacco, creatures of many species, less than perfect sewage and garbage containment, coffee and tea and spices. But the mind boggles. I don't know if I've ever smelled that many things at once.

Nineteenth Street Schul

North 19th and East Broad Streets

This was originally a synagogue, dedicated in 1908 by the Jewish community in the area. According to this article on the East End Jewish Community, there are rather a lot of sites within a few blocks which have been used by the Jewish community over the years, including the first Jewish cemetery in Virginia at North 21st and Franklin Streets.

This building was converted to residential use a couple years ago. The stairs on the front are new. Before this latest renewal, the building was painted bright yellow, flat fronted (no stairs, the doors were permanently closed), and being used as a warehouse in connection with the buildings off camera to the left (also painted bright yellow) (really not a good color choice, this corner looks much better now).

[Yes, another picture. There is so little else going on and otherwise all I could write about was translating, lying around reading and moping, and my cats. At least the new camera has me motivated to get out of the house. And if you want more, here's yet another picture, from over by St. John's Church.]

Richmond Pattern Works

100 block of West Broad Street, I think. I'll have to go back and check.

This is the maker's mark on an iron front building which most recently held the office for a Chinatown bus. Who knew? Direct to Chinatown, New York, New York. Bilingual signage and everything.

Many of the buildings in the older commercial districts have iron façes, and the façes were made right here in Richmond. Way back when, there were ironworks galore down by the river where today we have parks. There is usually a maker's mark, not usually so fancy as this one, somewhere on the façe. It's surprising how few repeats I've found. It's hard to believe there were that many different companies making façes, but I have no idea what the market must have been like.

A ghost sign gets ghostlier

Jefferson Avenue and East Clay Street

The old Tru-Ade sign on Nebe's Inn

The better beverage is fading fast. This sign is painted on tin, not brick or wood, and is being eaten alive (Eeek!) by the elements. It's only been two years since I took a picture of the brightest, clearest ghost sign I've ever seen, but you couldn't guess from looking at it today.

I remember being delighted when the outer layer of siding was removed from the building to reveal the sign, unfaded and relatively unblemished. I'd never seen a sign in such good condition. You wonder, what did the city look like back when all the signs were new?

Mosha's

North 25th and East Broad Streets

This was the first ghost sign I saw when I moved to Church Hill. Every time I went down Broad I'd see it and think, Mosha's. I wonder who Mosha was. My question was (sort of) answered later that year. This was the first time, and will likely be the only time, that anyone ever popped up at random and told me about a ghost sign.

For the first year I was living back in Richmond, I didn't have a car. When I wanted to visit friends up in DC, I took the Groome shuttle from the Holiday Inn on Staples Mill up to National Airport (and from there, the metro). There was one stop, at a hotel in Fredericksburg, to pick up or drop off a few passengers and let the drivers take a break. Once over the break, one of the drivers started talking to me. He was a white man, probably in his early seventies (and this happened back in 1993). He asked me where I was from and when I told him I lived in Church Hill, he said, "Oh! You know that place on Broad, the building with the sign Mosha's? That used to be a grocery store and the first job I ever had was delivering groceries for them by bicycle."

So that's the Mosha's story. Maybe not so exciting, but it's interesting for me. It used to be when I told people I lived in Church Hill, I'd get the "Oh, that horrible! dangerous! neighborhood!" reaction (usually from people who'd never set foot here), but occasionally someone would have a story to tell me.

Old things, new again

17th and East Main Streets

When I first moved back to Richmond in 1992 and for a long time after, these buildings were all boarded up (except for the buildings at the end of the row, which are no longer there). I didn't have a car, but since I was living in Church Hill, I could walk downtown for errands and what have you. In the summer, this was kind of a long, hot walk, but the south side of Main was shady in the afternoons and these buildings exhaled cool air onto the sidewalk. When I passed by, I would peek through the gaps in the plywood to see what was inside. Which was nothing, basically. They were shells, with the floors fallen in, and contained old junk, fractured joists, and a vast, cool, dark space. The Baldwin & Brown building (with the highest façe and the circular windows) was covered with pink and peeling paint. I don't recall the others looking much better. Before the buildings could fall all the way down, they were converted to apartments up and offices down.

Cubanola

West 7th and Bainbridge Streets
Just south of the river off Hull Street

Layers and layers of old signs, but the only word I can read is "Cubanola." One word is all you need when you have Google. Though the rest of the sign remains a mystery, I found out a lot about Cubanola.

Cubanola is a flower, a song, and a five cent Havana cigar (smoked by Australia's War Cabinet at the Victoria Barracks).

The Cubanola Glide (listen) was referenced by T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland.

Cubanola ghost signs have turned up all over. A woman found one beneath a plaster wall when she was restoring her old house in Baltimore. Another Cubanola sign was found on an interior wall in South Boston, Virginia. A sign as faded as this one is on a structure in Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

And, of course, I'm listening to Cuban music as I collect all these links. I had been planning to write something completely different …

Things I see

Seen on a visit to the secret bathtub graveyard. (If I tell you where it is, it won't be a secret.)

We went out and took pictures of things today. The bathtub graveyard was a side trip on our way to lunch from Rockett's Landing, where we went to get pictures of the ghost signs on the warehouses before they disappear altogether. The Richmond Cedar Works are being turned into a big retail/residential thing and the ghost signs will not likely survive the process. I made up a photo set which includes the one "before" picture I've got.

While the development is probably a Good Thing, I'll miss the signs. I always liked that stretch of Route 5. I can hop in my car, or just walk, and in just a few minutes be in a semi-rural industrial area with a view of the downtown skyline. With all the development around the city, this is (or was) one of the few places where you could pass from city to country instantly and without having to drive through suburb/exurb/shopping mall hell.

Façe

East End Movie Theater
By the post office, North Twenty-fifth Street, between Clay and Marshall

Today I got a shot of the front of the East End theater (which would still prefer to be a movie theater). It's currently being remodeled, you can see the pile of rubble and junk, including old refrigerators and mattresses, to the right of the theater. The façe may have looked really cool once upon a time, sort of a low budget art deco. The lower part of the façe was completely ripped off and the upper part is covered with peeling paint. Four tall, narrow windows are covered up with plywood. The top part of the outermost winglets has the zigzag form which appears on a small commercial building further down the block and on West Hospital across the Shockoe Valley.

So, here's the "before" picture. Eventually, I'll get an "after" picture and we can compare.

In other observations of the day, I note that today is the first day of classes at the university. For the first time in a very long time, I'm not there! And I didn't spend the last couple weeks having nightmares about showing up to class on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong room. It's cool to be out of school. This was also the second day in a row of unseasonably gorgeous weather. While weeding the yard with much less than the usual August misery, I found incriminating claw marks on my crepe myrtle. My prime suspect is the drooling tabby (we call him "Drooly"). I was still marveling about the low humidity and lack of haze when I went out for a walk this evening. From Libby Hill Park I could see out over the river valley for miles. Without the usual summer haze white-out, the trees were this rich, dark green and the river was all green tree and sky reflections. Wow! If it were like this all summer, we'd be overrun by Californians and totally priced out of our houses.

Poultry Food

Home of Hollybrook and Pamunkey Poultry Foods Cleanest Best
Warehouse No. 2 (and a palimpsest of company names)

North 18th and East Marshall Streets

I drove through the warehouse district in Shockoe Bottom this afternoon and caught this sign fading visibly. Or maybe it's just the light and the ivy. This building is located right at the entrance to the collapsed train tunnel. That grassy, gravely area in the foreground is where the train tracks used to run. Beyond that loading dock is a swampy mass of overgrowth that is too thick in high summer to see through to the tunnel entrance, which can only be photographed in winter at this point. I googled on "Hollybrook and Pamunkey" and got nothing, they must have been a very local outfit or maybe the company name didn't have enough mass appeal. "Poultry Foods" always makes me think of how "pasteurized processed cheese food" is not really cheese and perhaps "poultry food" is not exactly poultry. But I'm sure it tastes like chicken.

Hollybrook and Pamunkey are places in Virginia. Here's a story of some people born near Hollybrook. Pamunkey is the name of an Indian tribe and a river.

I just read that some (more) of the warehouses in this area will be converted to apartments and the developers are going to maintain the character of the exteriors. Some of the great old signs were ruined by graffiti (the perpetrator was caught and had to go to jail!), such as the Union Paper Towel Company sign which included a little black dog with a voice bubble saying "Union Towels are bone dry!", but maybe some of the others will be preserved.

Obelisk Flour

Obelisk Flour, Southland Wine, et al.
Oliver Hill Way and East Marshall Streets

This is the warehouse district down at the foot of Church Hill. Crisscrossing roads and parking lots, old train tracks sidle up to the buildings from which trains were loaded and unloaded. Tracks curve around behind and between the buildings. Tracks used to run right across the road, where that strip of asphalt is now. Those tracks are the ones that ran into the ill-fated Church Hill tunnel that collapsed back in 1925.

I went down there this afternoon, in the bad bright light, to take a picture of the Obelisk Flour building. When Oz and I drove by earlier in the day, I saw that the vines growing across the front had been pulled down, which means that someone is paying attention to the building. Restoration or destruction? I figured I'd better get a picture while I could, although I wish I'd waited till 7:00 or so when the light would have been kinder. There was so much glare that I couldn't even use the screen on my camera to frame up the shots.

I brought my toy octopus too.

I am quite fond of this Obelisk Flour sign because it includes bags of flour, although you can barely see them, and its proximity to the Egyptian Building (which I will make something of, fictionally). The Southland Wine Co. sign, complete with medallions, looks like it was painted earlier. I'm curious about the signage that isn't clear enough to read.

Until I can get better pictures, here are some other Obelisk Flour images: another blogger's ghost sign, a picture postcard of the Obelisk Flour plant, and some old advertising swag.

If walls could talk

East End Movie Theater
By the post office, North Twenty-fifth Street, between Clay and Marshall

At the moment I don't have a picture of the front of the old East End theater. I've always found the remains of the sign (that rusty thing hanging out over the sidewalk) quite interesting. The sign is presently a pigeon condo, as evidenced by the pile of pigeon poo beneath it. I like to imagine the sign brightly painted, with light bulbs chasing around the edge.

Ever since I moved to Church Hill in 1992, the theater has been empty. Some time before then, it was owned by a church (heck, it may even have been the church) which used it for their thrift shop. The thrift shop had been open recently enough that people still left piles of old clothes at the entryway, in lieu of making a proper donation at a shop that was actually open.

Last winter, I peeked inside the theater when I found the door ajar and saw that it was even more of a shell than I imagined: part of the roof was gone, the house was filled with thrift store junk, nothing remained of the theater fixtures that I could see. Some signs appeared on the front a while ago, belonging to, if I recall correctly, the company that renovated quite beautifully the house on the lot adjoining the theater. And after the house was finished up, things started happening to the theater! The trees growing through the fire escape were cut away, junk and weeds were cleared away from the walls, and a great big hole was cut in one of the sides.

This is encouraging. The theater will probably not be torn down. But what is it going to become?

The theater's preference is clear.

What the heck is Milam?

Take Milam for pure blood
Guaranteed [what?]

Mosby and Venable Streets

I've been googling around and I can't turn up anything on this Milam stuff. I've found a lot of streets called Milam, a county called Milam, people called Milam, people called Milam who have pictures of their tombstones posted (I've just discovered that there are people who make image catalogs of entire cemeteries). Nothing about pure blood, although there are some Milams involved in hematological research. It's obviously some kind of odd patent medicine that, judging by the lack of Googits, didn't make much of an impression except on this wall.

Anyway, isn't this a great ghost sign? I've been wanting to photograph it for a while, but hadn't gotten to it. This weekend we got stuck at this intersection when a funeral cortege was passing through on Venable and, smack in the middle of the street actually being the optimal location, I was able to take several shots from the comfort of my car.

But what is Milam?

What did they do for fun?

Having some free time, I went to the Special Collections department at the university library to read a back issue of Virginia Cavalcade and search for clues to the Coney Amusem. I learned many interesting things, but nothing specific about the ghost sign in question, although I could probably find it by lurking around the Historical Society or the Valentine Museum and reading back issues of the Richmond Planet, the newspaper for the African-American community in Richmond way back in the early twentieth century.

I can make some guesses though.

The Coney Amusem building is located facing Broad and near Second Street, which was the heart of the African-American commercial district. I couldn't find any reference to any kind of park in that area, but plenty of references to game rooms, meeting halls, and saloons. For now we'll assume it was a game room and the clientele were probably not white or female.

Other stuff I learned:

In the early twentieth century, the state fair was held right in town on Broad Street where the Science Museum and the big DMV are now.

Around the turn of the last century, leisure activities were segregated by gender. The racial stuff I was aware of, but women didn't really have too many places to go in public back then. Even shopping was kind of segregated, with women going to the big stores on the south side of Broad while the men's stuff (men got bars too) on the north side of the street and other areas downtown. It was a big deal when a movie about venereal disease came to town and women got to see it.

In the late nineteenth century, leisure activities generally involved drinking (no women allowed), church, or hanging out in the street. A few theaters catered to wealthy people. As more cheap movie theaters opened, the trolley lines made it easy to get around town, and the park facilities were developed, opportunities for social interaction and entertainment increased, especially for people who weren't wealthy.

Up into the 1930's, Forest Hill Park used to have a roller coaster, a merry-go-round, vaudeville, and a dance pavilion! You could go swimming or boating in the lake! Today all that is gone. The park, lake, and forest are still there and some old Victorian buildings too. Most of the city parks actually have at least one little Victorian bandstand or some other type of activities building dating from that era, but nothing remains of these more exciting things. So unfair. Summers when I was in high school, my friends and I had evening picnics at Forest Hill Park. The trolleys were long gone then, so we couldn't even do that until we could drive and had regular access to cars. All we could do was eat, hang out, and talk. Once we played ping pong in the parking lot. We had two paddles and a ball, no table, so it was rather haphazard to say the least. I feel rather cheated now that I've learned about the roller coaster.

Amuseum? Amusem—

Back of a building as seen from the Convention Center parking deck
Somewhere around North Third and East Marshall Streets

Could there have been some kind of Coney Island Amusement facility right in downtown Richmond? I googled around a little, but have no clues, although there is a "Coney Island Grill" (maybe) out in the West End. Further searching turned up a tantalizing reference (down in "Articles—Other") to an article to which I don't have online access, but which is available at the university library or the state library.

So much for the armchair historian thing. I may have to pop over there tomorrow to see what I can see. On the other hand, I did just determine that my university ID still works for proxy access to the research databases. I wonder how long that'll last.

Clarence Wyatt Transfer

East Broad Street and Oliver Hill Way
(just off I-95 in downtown Richmond)

As of today, this building is gone.

I took this photograph one year and five days ago. It's not a great photograph, I took it from the Exxon station on the opposite corner of the intersection while Oz was filling up his tank. I never did get around to taking a better one. I figured I had time. After all, the building's been there for over a hundred years.

Hah.

This is the northern end of Shockoe Bottom. This part of town is filled with nineteenth century warehouses and crisscrossed with train tracks and cobblestone streets. This building has (had) a long brick shed extending from its opposite side. You can see a tiny bit of it at the edge of the photograph, especially the part of the roof that is raised and glassed in on the sides to form a skylight that runs down the spine of the shed. The lamentably un-photographed (I thought I had time) shed has train tracks running along one side, and it is (was) pierced on both sides with large doors topped with basket-handle arches and built of darkened wood panels fit diagonally into the frames. I assume that back when that stretch of track was in use, the trains would pull up beside the shed and their goods would be unloaded into the shed to be placed in another train or loaded out the doors in the other side into wagons. The area around the buildings is paved with spallstones and is in use as a parking lot.

The building was still in use. Sometimes you'd see lights on in the shed or the office part.

Then the shed burned down one night last fall, back when I was still using a cane to get around, so no pictures of that either. A demolition crew has been knocking down the shed and wrapping up the bricks (bricks aren't manufactured in that size anymore, so these bricks can be sold to restorationists who are working on similarly aged buildings). Today they started on the office building. I'd been hoping that it might be saved since it was relatively less damaged in the fire.

This reminds me: I'd better photograph West Hospital, only three blocks from here, before the university knocks it down.

Toasted

Lucky Strike
"It's toasted"

Lucky Strike Factory
Pear and East Main Streets, or North 26th and East Cary if you're coming from the west

The building, yet another tobacco factory on Tobacco Row, is currently up for lease. It has the coolest smokestack in the world, or at least in town, and this sign and its twin at either end.

I don't have a lot to say about it, because my day has pretty much left me toasted too. I must stop thinking about the Hamsters and what of the ten things that I don't know how to do that I will have to do to them next. I'm going mad.

Pohlig Brothers Paper Box Factory

A. Pohlig Paper Box Factory
Pohlig Bros
Manufacturers of Paper Boxes of Every Description
Folding Box Dept.

North 25th and East Franklin Streets

For some reason, I keep getting hits from people searching for the Pohlig Brothers Paper Box Factory. I've mentioned this building exactly once and I suppose it's time to remedy that. This building is currently being converted to apartments. The factory was built in 1853 as a tobacco factory and was operated by various different tobacco companies, including Turpin which I'm only mentioning because the name always brings to mind shades of Sweeney Todd. During the Civil War it was used as a hospital, as were many of the buildings in the neighborhood. The Pohlig Paper Box Factory began operation here in 1909 and continued up until the 1990s (not under family ownership for the whole time). For a while after that, Showcase sold used store fixtures and furniture here. They had life-sized metal sculptures of the Blues Brothers sitting in chairs out front for months. When I walked past on my daily constitutional I used to knock on John Belushi. Bong! Once somebody purchased a twenty-foot long rococo painting that had once adorned the walls of an Express store. How do I know this? While on one of said constitutionals, I was walking on Richmond Hill overlooking Franklin Street. I saw this huge painting with, apparently, two sets of white-sneakered feet walking along Franklin.

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?

Hexagon

Tiled entryway
Restored but unoccupied building, formerly Scott's Drugs
East Franklin and North 17th Streets, by the Farmers' Market

Patented medicines

Scott's Drugs
Prescriptions
Drugs Sundries
Patented Medicines
Breakfast Luncheon
Service
Mail Orders Solicited
TruAde

Restored but unoccupied building
East Franklin and North 17th Streets, by the Farmers' Market

I think that the "Mail Orders Solicited" is bleeding through from a previous sign. And look, more Tru-Ade! If only Tru-Ade had spent as much money on signage as Coca Cola, we might still be drinking it today.

This building was a shell for as long as I could remember, but a few years ago we saw signs of activity inside. Now it's ready for the next diner to move on in. Whoever restored it even managed to preserve the tiling before the door either. I'll post a picture of that tomorrow.

Relieves fatigue

DELICIOUS AND REFRESHING
SOLD EVERYWHERE 5¢
Drink Coca-Cola
5¢ IN BOTTLES
AT FOUNTS 5¢
Drink Coca-Cola
RELIEVES FATIGUE

North 21st and East Main Streets

Sorry about all the capital letters, but they're in the sign. Whoever owns this building has done a great job with the exterior. I like how they've kept the ghost sign and added their own art. The other buildings in the row are all different and visually appealing, despite their lack of ghost signs, so I'll probably feature them later.

The houseplants sunning themselves on the sidewalk look pleased with the arrangement. I should give these people my plants; they are much better at plant maintenance than I am. And notice how two telephone poles stand side by side on the corner? The one on the right is held together by electrical tape. A few years ago a car crashed into it and the building as well. I'm glad the power company put in a new pole eventually (I seem to recall it taking quite a while for them to get around to it, longer than it took to fix the building), but I can't imagine that it was impossible to remove the old one. I guess you really can fix anything with tape.

Did you say 10¢?

Model Tobacco Factory
Jefferson Davis Highway and Hopkins Road

This building is no longer in use as a tobacco factory, but some web references suggest it may be in use, in part at least, as an office complex. Going by the plushy, emerald green moss thriving between the granite blocks of the steps up to the office door, it's not getting all that much use, which is unfortunate because it's a great door (image coming soon to a web log near you, if I can get a decent picture). This fabulous building towers above the neighborhood so you can see the words "Model Tobacco" from quite some distance away, hovering above the trees like a floating art deco apparition. The letters are much more enormous than you'd imagine, so your sense of perspective gets all messed up and you can't tell how far away it is. And don't the long columnar forms beneath the lettering look like cigarettes? Both ends of the building look the same, so you don't know if you're coming or going. According to one source, the building was designed by Schmidt, Garden & Erikson Architects out of Chicago and completed in 1940. Back in the day, Model Tobacco was big enough to sponsor a national radio show, "Pipe Smoking Time", which was hosted by Woody Guthrie, for as long as he could deal with being a corporate sellout (not long, about three months).

I decided to post the picture in black and white because the color version looked too much like a corporate postcard, only without great antique cars (click on the link, you'll be glad you did). My color picture looked like the sort of thing an aspiring corporate drone might buy at the company newsstand, mark with an arrow pointing to where his office is, and send to his parents. But in black and white—can't you hear the rattle of a projector and tinny fanfare, followed by a mid-twentieth century voiceover? "Model Tobacco brings you fine smoking tobacco products 'To light up your way' from their new ultra-modern facility in Richmond, Virginia, where tobacco is king…"

Nothing says love and romance like…

That about sums it up. Homework in the morning. I actually managed to finish the computer science stuff by 11:30 or so. The man came over after dropping by his office and we went to brunch. Then we drove around, taking pictures and looking at things, until he needed to drop in at his work again and I needed to do a little more studying. What I really did was fiddle around with software and the pictures on my computer for as long as I could. Once I finally got around to the maths, I made more headway than I thought I would.

The Daily Grind is down on Broad Street, nestled between I-95 and a railway trestle, right at the head of a parking lot. You'd think it would be the perfect place for people to pick up a coffee as they walk from their cars on up the hill to their jobs at the hospital or state offices, but I doubt this place has been open since before I moved back to town in 1992. Too bad, but I guess that makes it fair game for fiction.

Last week we stopped here and I took some pictures with my old primitive camera, none of which came out. While I was perching on the edge of the curb, trying to frame up my shots (which all ended up cropping something) and not fall into traffic, a man in a Lexus pulled off the road and asked me why. I think he was a real estate guy; he certainly had trouble understanding my reasons for photographing derelict buildings ("I like signs painted on brick."), and he seemed to think that I might be interested in acquiring the building. My financial situation doesn't extend to any more than a photograph and making up stories about it, thank you. The man thinks I am luring middle-aged men in Lexi off the road. Not on purpose, I assure him.

Do drop in

Nebe's Inn
Ice cream
Sandwiches
Candies
Tobacco

Jefferson and East Clay, the end of the building that faces Jefferson

The Tru-Ade sign in the previous entry is not the only ghost sign on that building. This end was painted with an ad for Nebe's Inn, a business that occupied this very odd-shaped building at some point. Judging by the tiny size of the structure (it's only one story and maybe only one room right now), I'm guessing that this was only a little sandwich place and market. I doubt it could have been a rooming house or anything like what we usually think of as an "inn", but the structure may have been larger once upon a time, so who knows? The southern (right) side certainly has a truncated look about it. I don't remember what kind of business was here last, although I do recall that a façe covered up the Tru-Ade sign. I was happy to see that come down.

A better beverage

Drink TRU-Ade
Pasteurized
Not carbonated
On the bottle: Vacuum Sealed

Jefferson and East Clay
The building is a shell right now. On close inspection, you'll find that it's not brick. It's actually a frame structure covered with pressed tin shingles stamped with a brick pattern. The damage on the sign is from where the tin is rusting out.

A little Googling reveals that Tru-Ade dates back to the 1950s and came in orange flavor. It was also advertised as "Cold, juicy, delicious" and "Sun-bright Fun-right". [Edited to add: A reader tells me that it also came in grape.]

The man gave me my Valentine's Day gift early: a new, wonderful digital camera with four glorious megapixels. My collection of ghost sign pictures is growing at an exponential rate as we become even more hyperaware of them.

Signal to noise

Serve Nolde's Bread

February 4, 2004
27th Street Inn, now a "laundro mat" with an apartment upstairs (possibly)
North 27th and East Marshall Streets

I must have walked by this old doorway hundreds of times before I actually read what was painted on the screen. Maybe this entry should be titled "Noise to signal" now that I've paid attention. That door must be at least fifty years old, I'm amazed the screen has survived at all.

The Nolde Bakery, now Merita, used to operate right here in the neighborhood. The bakery building is located at 26th and Broad and housed the Goodwill for many years (1978 to 1997). The Goodwill has since moved out to the West End and Southside, which is a shame, because where am I supposed to buy furniture now? For months after the Goodwill left, people would leave bags of clothes and old toys in the doorway. The people who bought the building finally got tired of having to throw it all in the dumpster (I'm assuming that's what they did) and put up a sign saying how they were not the Goodwill anymore, so don't leave stuff here. The sign was ignored, of course, but I think people have caught on at last. It's been a while since I've seen heaps of anything at the doors.

You need a biscuit

Geo. W. Taylor, Grocer and Feed Dealer!!
The National Soda Cracker
Uneeda Biscuit
Sold only in packages
5¢
National Biscuit Company

North 25th and East Broad Street

The sign is a palimpsest. I can see the letters of a previous sign faintly bleeding through, but I can't make out any words. The building currently houses a modeling agency.

The "sold only in packages" bit on the sign has always cracked me up, because I'd never seen crackers sold in anything but packages. Packages as opposed to what? Buckets? Well, yes, as became clear to me while I did the minimal research necessary to write this. Crackers used to be sold as a bulk item from barrels, hence the term "cracker barrel", and Uneeda Biscuits were the first crackers sold in boxes, which were advertised as being more sanitary.

While no longer 5¢ (I paid US$2.49 for a 99 gram box), Uneeda biscuits still have "sanitary packaging". There's a heavy plastic sleeve you need scissors to get into and a little plastic tray to hold the crackers and keep them from breaking. As advertised, the crackers are nice and flakey. I'm going to have to vacuum the room where I ate some. They are the best soup crackers I've ever had. They soak up the soup really quick, but still keep their cracker flavor. If you like your crackers to stay crispy in soup, these would not appeal to you, but I don't, so I think they're great.

The package copy notes that the crackers have "unsalted tops". The bottoms aren't salted either which, if you're eating them plain, makes for a bland snack. The package also features an illustration of the Uneeda Biscuit Boy (there's a picture at the Uneeda Biscuit link above), who looks much like one of my lab partners. I have to ask, why the oversized raincoat? Is he out looking for his girlfriend, the Morton Salt girl, so he can get some salt for those crackers?

Fresh Up

"fresh up" with 7up, the ALL Family drink
East Main between North 23rd and North 22nd

For many years, the sign was hidden behind a billboard. The billboard actually protected the sign fairly well, excepting the damage from where junk got caught between the building and the billboard.