In the 1930s, the Bendix company licensed a line of home washing machines.
Which means this enormous faded ad on an East 109th Street and First Avenue tenement could be about 80 years old.
The tagline “For Cleaner Clothes, Bendix Prescribes All” still survived on 23rd Street and in this location through the 2000s.
Cardinal Realty has moved over to Fulton Street since this enornous black and white ad went up in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
It’s in pretty good condition, but it could be more than 40 years old—the old two-letter phone exchanges were still officially in use through the 1960s.
NE for Nevins Street, on the other side of Prospect Park. Thanks to Ephemeral reader Sheena for sending in this photo.
Here’s an invaluable resource for decoding old New York City phone exchanges.
Tags: ads on tenements, All detergent, Bed-Stuy faded ads, Bendix washing machines, Cardinal Realty Brooklyn, East Harlem faded ads, faded ads, faded bulding ads, New York City ads, New York street, Vintage ads
April 9, 2011 at 10:58 pm |
Great stuff. One of my early memories of living in Little Italy as a child in the 1940s is standing in front of a Bendix machine in a laundromat on Hester Street, watching the moving suds. It was kind of hynotic.
Anyway, I guess Bendix was kind of promiscuous in its advertising. It certainly wasn’t faithful to the “All” brand of laundry detergent. The October 22, 1956 issue of LIFE magazine carried an ad that said, “Dash…the *only* detergent packed in every Bendix Automatic Washer.” It was a Dash ad, not a Bendix ad, but clearly Dash had a deal with Bendix that included this kind of advertising.
I suppose the material is copyrighted. You can see it on Google books, here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tEEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=Bendix+any+other+automatic+washer&source=bl&ots=YrudEsIO_2&sig=wumJa393DXfEtBxAf-XRGAzvOvM&hl=en&ei=X-KgTYOwM6jn0QHx3IiWCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBQ#
April 9, 2011 at 11:02 pm |
That’s cool, thanks! So I guess the building ad could be from the 1950s, since Bendix was still in the sudsy laundry biz then.