These building corner street signs are fading fast

I love spotting these on random New York corners. But I’ve never seen one designed like the sign carved into a brick walkup at Hudson Street and St. Luke’s Place, with house numbers in the mix.

East Harlem has lots of century-old tenements—and lots of corner carvings. Too bad “109th Street” was obliterated from this one at Third Avenue.

A corner sign in Chelsea features stately lettering. It’s at Ninth Avenue and 19th Street and is in bad shape, but still doing its job of letting passersby know where they are—at least in part.

Cross street carvings on Bleecker Street buildings

Bleecker Street west of Sixth Avenue has gone upscale over the past decade.

But I wonder how many of the boutique shoppers and cupcake eaters who now crowd this meandering old road notice the old street signage carved into building corners.

This one is on the southeast corner at West 10th Street, above a designer jeans store housed in a classic city six-story tenement.

Across the street is another low-rise brick apartment building. The carving appears on the corner, above Village Apothecary. Is street abbreviated “str”?

You really have to squint to see this next one, two corners away on Perry Street. It’s showing its age on a five-story walkup.

Street names carved into neigborhood corners

This street address in Hell’s Kitchen, on a traditional turn-of-the-century tenement building, looks like it was meant to last.

Over in Brooklyn Heights though, this one is faded and weathered; you can barely make out the T at the end of the “ST” on both sides.

It too is on a red brick building, but this one was probably a private home for a well-to-do family.

Many old city neighborhoods still have these street name carvings, like the East Village, the Lower East Side, and this beauty in Tribeca.

More cross streets carved into tenement corners

Before you could Google-map your location on your smart phone, and even before every corner of the city had accurate signs, these chiseled street names came in pretty handy, letting you know where you were.

Mostly you see them in tenement-heavy neighborhoods like the East Village, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side.

Brownstone and tenement Brooklyn have plenty too, like this faded old carving at Underhill Avenue and Bergen Street in Prospect Heights.

Not all cross street carvings are in neighborhoods once poor or working-class. One of the loveliest of all is at University Place and “Twelfth Street East,” done up Beaux-Arts style.