Book records his life’s work of finding ads for elixirs, pain remedies and pool halls of yesteryear

Monday, January 2 2012, 6:00 AM

One of the ads from Frank Jump’s ‘Fading Ads of New York City,’ this one for a pain remedy of yesteryear.

Throughout the city, Frank Jump sees what others don’t. He sees ghost signs — those ads painted on the sides of buildings that retreat from the eye as time passes — and they leap out at him.

Then he reaches for his camera.

“Fading Ads of New York City” is a collection drawn from thousands of pics taken throughout the five boroughs. It began on a long ago day when Jump went to Harlem with a friend. At Frederick Douglass Blvd. and 147th Street, he noticed the giant wall mural boasting of the powers of an elixir, Omega Oil.

“My jaw dropped,” says Jump. “I climbed up on scaffolding and got the picture before the police told me to get down.”

So began a life’s work.

At first, Jump shot in chrome. His slide show of the tell-tale signs of a New York gone by numbers upward of 5,000. Since switching to digital, his collection of sightings has swelled to tens of thousands taken all over the world.

“Whenever we travel, we get a room in the seediest part of town,” says Jump. “Usually you find these ads in a part of town where they haven’t done any renovations yet.”

Ask Jump what his favorite signs are in the book, and you get an idea of how he works. Capturing “Reckett’s Blue,” an ad on Washington Ave. in Brooklyn that is now obscured, came about because a relative grew bored at a family dinner. He took her out to show her how he worked.

“We came on a construction pit, so I broke through the plywood and there it was,” says Jump, who teaches media literacy to elementary school students. “She thought I had staged it, but neighbors told us it had just been exposed that week.”

One of the more difficult shoots came when the owners of an auto parts store refused him access to the roof so he could snap the “Hams and Capocolli” sign that stared over the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They turned their backs, up he went, so they loosed the pit bulls.

“But for some reason the dogs took a liking to me, which made the guys even angrier,” he says. “When they chased me out, one of the dogs followed me and wouldn’t go back.”

Jump was 26 in 1986 and working in theater “off, off, Off-Broadway,” when he was diagnosed as HIV-positive. After being told he had only a few good years left, if that, his reaction was to max out his credit cards. One of those purchases was a camera.

He is a survivor, he says, like the signs he memorializes. More than half of the ads he photographed for the book are gone now, but all outlived their expectancy.

“So many of them outlasted the products they advertised,” he notes. “They are a metaphor for survival.”

And brick-and-mortar proof of it, as well.