
© Frank H. Jump

Supply Centre – Cash Purchases © Frank H. Jump
vintage mural ads & other signage by Frank H. Jump & friends

Broadway & W237th Street © Frank H. Jump

© Frank H. Jump

© Frank H. Jump

© Frank H. Jump

© Frank H. Jump

© Frank H. Jump
Fudge-filled cookies and crunchy breadsticks. Stella D’oro, Italian for star of gold, instantly conjures images of baked goods in the minds of people throughout the country. For the Kingsbridge factory’s nearby neighbors, its distinctive scripted logo can also trigger memories of batting for the Stella D’oro Little League team, eating in the Stella D’oro restaurant or coming home from school and being carried away by the aroma of the cookies being made.
The company that began in 1930 is likely to end its nearly 80 year run in Kingsbridge when the factory is shut down in October. To its neighbors and the family that can claim the famous fragrance as its legacy, the decades have been about more than just cookies.
Joseph Kresevich, an Italian immigrant, and his wife, Angela Kresevich, opened up their first factory on Bailey Avenue around 1930 (there’s actually no family consensus on the company’s official beginning, though its trucks have that year emblazoned across them).
The Kresevichs moved the plant to its current location on West 237th Street and Broadway around 1950 and also opened up a red-checkered-tablecloth restaurant on the site within the decade. – Riverdale Press

© Vincenzo Aiosa
Holabird & Roche have the distinction of designing two buildings in Chicago that eventually bore the same name, the Champlain… [In 1902] the building was built by a consortium of investors on a piece of property that already had a building standing on it. The architectural firm was so good at what they did that their 13-story tower opened for occupancy in December of 1902, just 8 months after demolition had begun on the old building… In 1938 after the Powers name change, the building underwent a “modernization” which stripped the first two floors of their original facades… By 1988 the School of the Art Institute itself was outgrowing their studio building at the museum and purchased the nearby Champlain for additional class and office space. – Design Slinger

© Vincenzo Aiosa

© Vincenzo Aiosa
From Hubert Pleijsier’s book, Washburn Prewar Instrument Styles: Guitars, Mandolins, Banjos and Ukuleles 1883-1940:

© Hubert Pleijsier – Google Books

A general view of the Far Rockaway station… In the mid 1920s – Courtesy of The Wave – CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

John Winkler’s Sons – Fur Storage © Frank H. Jump

© Frank H. Jump

© Frank H. Jump
Internet resources:
Flying pigs, retro hairstyles and hand grenades are among some of the images found in this new book celebrating the art and craft of Cambodia’s hand-painted advertising.
Sam Roberts, a long-time member of the visual anthropological and urban archaeological community, has published his first book Hand-Painted Signs of Kratie, a brilliant and colorful monograph that “introduces the signs, the people who paint them and uses them to explore Cambodia’s art, culture and history.” Mr. Roberts has authored the website and archival project called Ghostsigns UK and has been instrumental in the historic preservation and documentation of vintage painted adverts in his island nation. Roberts was drawn to this “quirky” form of hand-painted advertising while he and his wife Gilly were doing humanitarian work with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Cambodia.
While the signs have experienced something of a resurgence in the last three decades, they now face another demise, this time at the hands of technological and economic development. In this respect, author Sam Roberts draws parallels with his interest in ‘Ghostsigns’, the fading remains of advertising painted on buildings in his native UK: “The loss of hand-painted signs marks a distinct period in countries’ economic development. It is the point at which access to technology and rising labour costs tip the balance in favour of mechanical or digital formats. In the UK this happened in the middle of the last century, in Cambodia it is happening today.”
You could blame Robert Moses, which seems to be the fashion, or you could say it’s just the American way, that unique form of active amnesia we seem to have that means forgetting vast swaths of our history, and either painting over or demolishing the rest; either way, huge amounts of our urban landscape have been “made new” and made over, with much history — architectural and cultural — being lost along the way. We can see those faded fingerprints around us still, sometimes in lingering architectural details on the buildings that have survived one renewal or gentrification too many, and other times in the faded, hand-painted signs that cling stubbornly to those same buildings.
That brings us to Fading Ads of New York City, written by Frank Jump, the curator of the long-running Fading Ad website. I’ve lost track of how many websites have spawned books in the last few years, and how many of those books I’ve passed up because I couldn’t see myself reading them more than once, regardless of how many times the website in question made me laugh, made me think, or gave me goosebumps. With that said, I was very happy to come across this book, which takes some of Jump’s best shots and writing, and puts the lot of it between covers. – Read more @ The First 10000 Reviews Fading Ads of New York City by Frank Jump.