Ragu has been mass producing its popular tomato sauces since the 1940s. But I’d guess this wonderfully preserved full-color ad for Ragu spaghetti sauce dates to the 1970s.
It’s on the side of a restaurant on Sixth Avenue just below Canal Street. What a visual treat, coincidentally near the once-thriving Little Italy in Soho and Greenwich Village, where store-bought sauce might be considered an insult!
The traditional two-letter phone number prefix was officially abandoned in the 1960s.
From time to time, as readers of this site know, they sometimes reveal themselves in faded ads and randomly found signs, like these two below.
I’m not exactly sure what an asbestos curtain was, but American Stage Equipment sold them from an East Harlem office South Bronx office.
The CY exchange is new to me, but according to this guide, it stands for cypress, which places it in the Bronx. The sign hangs in an antiques shop in Brooklyn.
ST could have stood for stagg or sterling in Brooklyn, stillwell in Queens, or Stuyvesant in Manhattan. It was found on a Flatiron building, so Stuyvesant is a good bet.
With the tree limbs that obscure it for most of the year almost bare, this old painted ad comes into view at Second Avenue and 109th Street.
But what is the advertisement for—something about Stanton Street, which is more than 100 blocks south?
“Shirts Underwear Etc” this faded advertisement reads on the back of an old brick building on 28th Street near Fifth Avenue.
Perhaps the building housed an old Garment District wholesaler or manufacturer—long out of business, judging from the condition of the building?
In 1915, when this photo was taken, Lexington Avenue at 116th Street was firmly in the Little Italy of East Harlem, hence the Italian in the signs on the far right above a chemist’s office.
“This section of East Harlem was developed during the 1880s with the familiar New York brownstone residences and walk-up apartments,” states New York Then and Now, where the photo and the one below appear.
“One block west is the elevated crossing of the New York Central and New Haven Railroads on Park Avenue. The Subway Cafe, on the right-hand corner, anticipates the opening of the Lexington Avenue subway by three years.”
By 1975, the Italian neighborhood is mostly gone; Puerto Rican New Yorkers have moved in. The buildings themselves haven’t changed much—and the Bloomingdale’s ad from 1915 is visible 60 years later.
In 2012, the streetscape still looks similar. The corner building that went from saloon to Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet is now home to a taco shop, a sign of the neighborhood’s Mexican population.
And though the Bloomingdale’s ad on the corner has been painted over, next to it out of view, a second Bloomingdale’s ad is still legible! Here it is from an earlier Ephemeral post.
“Lunch Soda Lounge” reads this ghostly old signage on 35th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
I imagine the place had a long, skinny luncheonette counter and metal swiveling seats.
Beef? Beer? I’m not sure what the vertical word is under this coffee shop ad on East 23rd Street, nor do I have any idea when it dates to.
“Coffee Shop” itself is a lost term. It’s too anonymous, not descriptive and unique enough for today’s specialty coffee culture.
These once-respectable hotels have long been shut down or converted into apartment houses or SROs.
Lucky for us, the advertisements for them on the sides of city buildings still linger. Like this one for the Paris Hotel, which opened in 1931 on West End Avenue and 97th Street.
Today it’s a high-end rental. The pool is still there, but I wonder if they still have the rooftop solarium.
Towering over East 39th Street is this ad for the Dryden East Hotel, formerly the Hotel Dryden, built in the late 1920s. It too is now a luxury residence.
You can barely make out the name on this ad, for the Vigilant Hotel on Eighth Avenue off 28th Street. Once a legitimate place to bunk for the night, it’s now one of the last fleabag flophouses in the city.
Before it gets the inevitable boutique hotel makeover, read the fascinating details on what it’s like to stay at the Vigilant, from this first-person account.
Faded ads that are preserved in full are treasures. But most of the old signage found around the city consists of just one or two legible words—maybe a name or a type of service.
Whose business was it? What did they sell or manufacture? Without more words as clues, we may never know.
On the side of a prewar building now known as the Amsterdam Court Hotel at 50th Street and Broadway is this faded ad for apartments. How many rooms? How much per month? I wish we knew.
This faded sign, as seen from Sixth Avenue in the 20s, appears to read “R. S. Stern.” If this is correct, I wonder what Mr. Stern’s company sold.
We’re losing them—the white (and sometimes color) ads painted on the sides of buildings left over from an older, non-digital New York.
I can make out the “Sable Bros” part of this one, on 36th Street. But to figure out what the white letters fronting the blue background, I had to consult the wonderful 14 to 42 website, which photographed the ad when it was in better shape back in 2004.
This next one, in the 20s off Seventh Avenue, is too far gone to even try to research, except for what seems to be the word “paper” at top.
If anyone can figure it out, please send it in!
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.
Ephemeral New York 