#340: Service & Delivery

Upper West Side, NYC

A hand-drawn ampersand AND a weird amorphous finger pointing the way to an otherwise forgettable service & delivery entrance? Like it.

Dublin Dereliction Duty: The Snug

The Liberties, Dublin

I like this one, even though the crouching kid in the window reminds me of that precious Tears for Fears album cover. Cheer up, kid, and go get yo'self some mad bric-a-brac.

Dublin Dereliction Duty: Wines & Spirits

The Liberties, Dublin

It's been a good while since the ampersand has gotten an airing in these parts, so consider this one long overdue. As for the Gothic lettering, I've been a fan of these typefaces ever since my childhood when the family would pile into the car and, on special occasions, go to the neighboring suburb to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in a strip mall called Castlewood. Castlewood, alas, is long gone, replaced probably by some insipid T.G.I. Fridays, but it lives on in memory. The place was not nearly as theatrical as Medieval Times -- no jousting, no surly nose-ringed cocktail wenches -- but it did milk the castle theme for all it was worth: heraldic menus, suits of armor lodged into red-velvet nooks and, of course, this Olde English font that's de rigeur for any decent castle-themed establishment.

As for this crumbling artifact in the Liberties, who knows how long it will be allowed to stand in its current state of decay. But I do know that wines & spirits signs go hand in hand with the weekend.

#339

#339, Lower East Side, NYC

A favorite among fading ad enthusiasts, ghost sign collectors, and hunters of the New York ephemeral (do not be fooled by our intrepid nature: we are legion), this decaying 339 on Grand Street on the Lower East Side is the gold standard.

"Ideal" was the big advertising promise back in the day -- you can see another example of it in my #20, Samuel Cohen's Son Ideal Class on 2nd Street -- and here both ladies & men could rest assured that they could fetch their ideal hosiery wholesale from this corner shop. (It begs the question, what exactly is men's hosiery, anyway?) My heart went pitter-patter when I discovered this gorgeous specimen of urban decay earlier this year on an otherwise uneventful number-hunting expedition on the LES, and if I wasn't already bought, sold, and sent down the river at first glance, when I glimpsed that tiny fading ampersand I sure as heck was.

More gawking, speculating, history-mongering, and oohing and ahhing to be found from fellow friends at Greenwich Village Daily Photo, Lost City, and Fading Ad Blog. Or take a stroll down Hosiery Row and see for yourself. Have an ideal weekend.

#238

#238, Tucson, Arizona

The heat in Tucson in mid-July was nasty and infernal; it's the sort of thing that would drive someone to say, "You know what? I'm gonna stick this wicker chair on the roof." It inspired a perspiring David Foster Wallace to adopt his signature bandana so he wouldn't drip on his manuscripts, and it drove me into a tiki bar (granted, I was playing a gig there) where I ordered a drink called Fat Man on a Diet. Strange things happen in the Tucson heat, and when umlauts appear over numbers, you know you're in uncharted territory, my friend. The 8 also appears to have a blank word bubble hovering off to the side, a feature I've seen throughout New York plastered on ads and bus shelters, but next to a number is a new one on me. All I know is, when the 8 starts talking to me, I'm sticking my head in a bucket of ice.

#211

#211, South Street Seaport, NYC
Ampersand fans, here's another for the collection.

#175

#175, Elk Grove Village, IL

#139

#139, Baggot Street, Dublin

My senior year of college, I dressed up like William Butler Yeats. Not every day, sadly, though I have to confess I cut a surprisingly sharp figure in a cape, flouncy poet's tie, and pince-nez. I made a pretty good six-foot-two Irishman for a five-foot-two American girl, and sometimes I think they must've switched souls at the Illinois hospital where I was born with a word-struck mystic outcast lad from Sligo. We've been trying to find each other ever since.

The method to the cross-cultural cross-dressing madness was a one-person show for my Non-fiction Studies class in the Performance Studies department. We were to research the life of a historical figure, put together a script using only primary sources (diaries, letters, first person accounts), and then perform a 30-40 minute long show where we became this historical figure. There were my classmates, parading about as Janis Joplin, Anais Nin, Frank Zappa, Bette Davis, and me, W.B. Yeats. The life of the party.

I mention this today, for 139's pub mural, because Yeats was not a drinking man. This asocial quirk did not make him popular among his fellow countrymen. As a child, children would jeer as he approached, lanky and gloomy, "O, here is King Death again!" As a grown-up, he was known as "Willie the Spooks." George Moore said of W.B. that he looked "like an umbrella left behind at a picnic." And as you can see, here he's been ousted from the hard man's drinking party with James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh who are clearly living it up, bad eyesight and all, on the wall of Toner's. Only look at those drugged expressions. What do you suppose they're drinking, absinthe?

In any case, the famous prankster, writer, surgeon, and man-about-town Oliver St. John Gogarty (fictionalized as the character Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses) decided enough was enough with old stick-in-the-mud Willie and decided it was time Yeats fix his pub deficiency. (Yeats, apparently, had somehow made it to adulthood having never set foot in a pub, too busy writing unrequited love letters to Maud Gonne, the poor fella.) And so Gogarty convinced Yeats to have a couple of jars one night at Toner's on Baggot Street. Yeats sat quietly at a corner in Toner's, sipping his sherry. He finished his drink, stood up stiffly and announced, "I have seen a pub. Will you kindly take me home now," and left.

Still and all, I happen to love old W.B., and if I'd been alive when he was alive, I'd be dead now. But if he was alive today, I'd be sure to put up my dukes and defend poor King Death. Though I might find myself drinking alone, alas.

#46

#46, Lynch & Sons, Dublin

The hand-painted pub sign in Ireland is a vanishing art. The more I've watched Dublin succumb over the last ten years to the bumper crop of ghastly cheap shop fronts of convenience stores like Spar and Centra (sobering evidence here), the more old hand-painted signs like this feel like an endangered species. These derelict buildings linger sometimes for years between demolition and preservation, and that's when people like me sweep in with the cameras or wander the grounds with simple curiosity, admiring what remains and wondering what will become of the old buildings we admire.

A few years ago, a friend of mine and fellow lover of dereliction printed up for me an article by architecture critic Hugh Pearman article (from the excellent Gabion site) that has since become a kind of private manifesto. The piece is called "Not building: the lure of desolation". It describes a very personal way of reacting to changes in the built environment. For me, it's right up there with Pessoa and Borges for meditative bedside reading. A brief excerpt:

Like an ending love affair or the maturing of a loved child, dereliction contains both loss and hope. What has happened - known, and perhaps lamented - is offset by what is to happen, which may be worse but which might just possibly be good. The frozen moment between two states of activity is, for me, supremely poignant. Because - anywhere that land has a value - it will not be allowed to remain in this state. It is inevitable, even desirable, that a new use should be found for it, whether it is an abandoned brownstone, a derelict railhead where the birches shoulder through the ballast, or a wharfside where ships no longer dock and weeds sprout among the cranes. Except in extreme cases, these are assets with investment potential or civic value. So be it - but I wish it were not always so.

You can read the rest here.

And yes, after weeks of accumulated numbers (many of which contain seven), here it is at long last: the first official ampersand of the collection. Lovely ligatures, aren't they?