American Sign Museum
2515 Essex Place
Cincinnati, Ohio 45206
(800) 925-1110
(513) 258-4020, ext. 336
Fax: (513) 421-5144
E-mail: tod@signmuseum.org
|
So Many Signs, So Little Time
Walter Grutchfield documents New York City's many signs
By Sam Knight, The New York Times
Walter Grutchfield, white-haired and thoughtful, walks the streets
of Midtown as if seeing them for the first time. As New Yorkers pile
past, heads down, Mr. Grutchfield is looking up, stopping at every
corner. But he is no mere tourist or shopper, gawking at high-rises
or shiny billboards. Mr. Grutchfield, who has lived in the city for
more than 40 years, is searching out advertising for products that
are no longer on sale, for businesses that no longer exist.
"This is as good as it gets," says Mr. Grutchfield, 68, squinting
into the sun and the blue sky as he looks up at a forgotten 1949 sign
for Necchi's sewing machines, painted across six stories of a
building on West 25th Street.
Mr. Grutchfield is an archaeologist of signs. He has set himself
the task of photographing every old sign in Manhattan between 14th
and 42nd Streets, a 300-block area containing some of the most
densely inscribed buildings in the world.
Mr. Grutchfield is part of a small but connected national effort
to record the ephemera and variety of signage, which even in the age
of the Web and television remains a primary form of advertising.
Later this summer, the American Sign Museum is to open in Cincinnati
with a collection of more than 200 signs and thousands of photographs
of advertising spectaculars, as the most lavish of them were known.
"The irony is that because signs are so omnipresent, they are
often overlooked," said Tod Swormstedt, the museum's director. "But
they take so many shapes and sizes, they're pretty much part of pop
culture."
Mr. Grutchfield guesses there are around 30,000 signs in his
chosen territory, but he is concentrating on those that have been
there the longest and are fading the fastest. He has found more than
1,500, some from businesses that are long forgotten and others that
market products that are still around. He has taken more than 3,300
photographs, and logs his images and sign histories on his Web site
(www.14to42.net). In response he has received e-mail messages and
queries from enthusiasts across the world. He acknowledges that his
project will never end.
"There's no way to finish," he said the other day, standing under
a faded 1920's oval-shaped sign for "Englander's, Productions for
Sleep and Rest" on the Avenue of the Americas and 32nd Street.
Mr. Grutchfield first started taking pictures of New York's
buildings and signs in 1986, but, originally, he said, he was "only
interested in the graphic element: in something that was big and
beautiful."
Not until he retired from his job as a computer programmer at the
New York Public Library three years ago and began to spend more time
taking photos did he start to feel a responsibility to document the
city's signs rather than just enjoy them. "I suddenly realized how
much was there and how much the area was in the process of changing,"
he said, "I said to myself, 'Somebody's got to preserve this stuff,
to honor it.' "
Mr. Grutchfield chose the area between 14th and 42nd Streets
because it was near his Upper West Side apartment and because of the
extraordinary proliferation of old signs in Midtown and the Garment
District.
His specialty is what he calls the wall-painted sign, or what
others call mural signs or "ghost signs": advertisements painted in
huge letters across buildings, normally more than 50 years ago. Once
a business dies, moves or wants a new image, old advertisements are
seldom saved.
Recording the old signs, Mr. Grutchfield has walked all of his
chosen 29 cross streets and dozen or so avenues at least twice,
scanning the walls from every angle, puzzling at the faded letters.
And after the initial rush of collecting images, his task has
changed. Now he spends most of his time back in the library where he
worked for 31 years, going over business and phone directories,
piecing together the mysterious broken names of old furrier shops and
dead dentists.
As he sees his work, he is assembling an enormous jigsaw puzzle,
piecing together fragments and vagaries from the tiny trades that
flourished in New York before World War II, the world of glass eyes
and taxidermist supplies, where small businesses painted their names
one on top of the other down the nearest stretch of exposed wall.
Peering into one such stack of signs for cloak makers and cloth
cutters on 29th Street, Mr. Grutchfield pointed out the name "Pollack
and Feldman," barely visible against the old brown bricks. "It says
he makes muff beds," he said. "Now what the hell's a muff bed?"
Sometimes the search to fill in the blanks of a weathered sign is
easy: a company history, a title deed or an old photograph will
supply the missing letters. Other times it presents a considerable
challenge, and in a few cases, the trail has gone entirely cold. But
Mr. Grutchfield soldiers on.
"I've got a list of about 15 that I just can't get the nameof
them and, yeah, it bothers me," he said before disappearing into the
crowds. "I mean, I know they've got to be out there somewhere."
|
|
|