Somewhere Above Canal Street © Frank H. Jump
Although I had learned and come to respect Frank Jump’s work in documenting ghost signs, it wasn’t until the summer of 1999 that I had the opportunity to meet him in person. Jump happened to be on a road trip, heading back to New York City, and took time to stop and see what I was doing as founder of the American Sign Museum, here in Cincinnati. The museum was very much in its infancy then, and I had just begun to assemble a collection of vintage signs and sign-related items.
Several months later, I had the occasion to visit with Frank and his partner, Vincenzo, at their Brooklyn home. That opportunity was all about our mutual interests, and we’ve remained friends as both of our projects progressed. I will never forget that first visit to see Frank…
My trip to New York was a last-minute mission of mercy. The urgency had been created by a phone call I received from Ilaria Borghese, the great-granddaughter of Douglas Leigh, the creative genius behind Times Square’s Great White Way. As she explained, Leigh’s widow (and second wife), Elsie, was planning to clean out their former Upper East Side apartment in the next two days, and all was going in a dumpster. She said, “If you want anything, you’d better get up here and grab it.”
I couldn’t believe it—Douglas Leigh’s incredible legacy being tossed in a dumpster. I booked the next flight I could get to LaGuardia. As I was scrambling to get details together, I remembered Frank’s invitation from the summer before to stop by. I called him and, in a rather frantic voice, tried to explain my dilemma, asking if he could pick me up at the airport and let me stay overnight. “Sure,” he said without hesitation. “You can tell me all about it when you get here.”
He picked me up that evening, and over dinner, I rehashed my conversation with Ilaria and told him my plan was to get over to the apartment and save as much as I could. Frank said he would drive me over to the former Leigh penthouse first thing in the morning. He told me he had to be at work at noon that day but he’d do whatever he could to help up until he had to leave.
What Frank and I found when we exited the seventh-floor elevator was an expansive apartment with boxes piled everywhere. It was just like Ilaria said it would be: a bunch of workmen gathering up the boxes indiscriminately and loading them onto the same elevator for disposal in the dumpster waiting street-side. Frank and I were able to put the workmen off for a time while we scurried around taking stock of the various piles and trying to segment the archival items from the clothes, furniture and other personal items. Toward the end, we were actually grabbing boxes from the workmen’s arms and stacking them to the side.
At one point, Elsie asked if we wanted “the Snowflake,” and we both looked at each other and said in unison, “The Snowflake?” Unfortunately, I was not equipped to ship the several-ton illuminated snowflake that had hung over the intersection of 57th and Fifth Avenue every holiday season. By the end of the day, we were able to save a little more than seven hundred items, dominated by historic photographs, slides and sketches of Leigh’s work and nearly three hundred cans of 16mm promotional films. We were even fortunate to save such things as Leigh’s Rolodex and several personally annotated scrapbooks of newspaper and magazine clippings documenting Leigh’s career.
When I founded the American Sign Museum, the mission was to inform and educate the general public, as well as business and special interest groups, about the history of the sign industry and its significant contribution to commerce and the American landscape. Frank Jump has played a part as preservationist in this mission, having spent the last two decades urgently documenting the history of mural advertisements throughout the five boroughs of New York City with his Fading Ad Campaign.
Tod Swormstedt
Founder of the American Sign Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
Former editor and publisher of Signs of the Times Magazine
From The Fading Ads of NYC (History Press, 2011) © Frank H. Jump
Happy Winter Solstice!
Jet Lens Flare © Frank H. Jump
