White Plains Road – From the book Fading Ads of NYC (History Press, 2011) © Frank H. Jump
Fading Ads of NYC – the book
Queens Native Captures Ghost Ads On Film | www.qgazette.com | Queens Gazette
Queens native Frank Jump has been photographing the fleeting images of “ghost ads” around the five boroughs for years.
In a city which is eternally evolving, the new is perpetually being built on the debris of the past. But a movement to preserve the city’s vanishing landscapes has emerged. For more than 20 years, Jump has been documenting the fading ads that are visible, but less often seen, all over New York City. Disappearing from the sides of buildings or hidden by new construction, these signs are remnants of lost eras of New York’s consumer history.
These gorgeous images captured on color film have now been compiled into an authoritative tome on the subject entitled, Fading Ads Of New York City (History Press). – J.Antos, Queens Gazette
READ MORE AT: Queens Native Captures Ghost Ads On Film | www.qgazette.com | Queens Gazette.
Coca-Cola and Mecca Smokes Pentimento – Bleecker & Carmine Streets, NYC – 1997
Circa 1905 – From the Fading Ads of NYC (History Press, 2011) © Frank H. Jump
In explaining a layered fading ad, I’ve always used the term pentimento, a painterly term that describes evidence of a previous work on a canvas seen through an existing upper layer. Viewing these works under varied wavelengths of light, like ultraviolet, infrared and even X-ray scanning, can aid scientists in deciphering both palimpsests and pentimenti. The use of the word pentimento in “street and photography” has also been cited on the Internet as a term “used in a modern sense to describe the appearance of the sides of buildings with painted advertising.” Often when newer ads are painted over older ads, “the paint wears away to reveal the older layers.” Examples of this can be seen in the work I did in the Netherlands in 1998 while photographing fading ads in Amsterdam¹. – From the Fading Ads of NYC (History Press, 2011) © Frank H. Jump
Booker Travels to TriBeCa with The Fading Ads Tour!
Booker Travels is a series of weekly webisodes about traveling and living life outside. Teenage travelers are the new explorers of the world we live in, the re-discoverers of our planet and now, the guides to our travels. Booker Travels is an original program by B Travels Network.
Hosted by 16-year-old Booker and his friends, Booker Travels documents journeys to great destinations through their eyes. Teenage travelers are the new explorers of the world we live in, the re-discoverers of our planet and now, the guides to our travels. – Booker Travels/About
This past Saturday I had the pleasure to walk the Fading Ads of TriBeCa tour with Booker, his mom- producer & director, Tânia Cypriano and cameraman Daniel Burity. Together we set out on a discovery of TriBeCa’s vintage advertising, faux vintage ads & architectural attractions. Airing of this episode of Booker Travels is tentatively set for the Spring of 2014.
The Snowflake – On Advertising Legend Douglas Leigh – by Tod Swormstedt
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
Standard Scale & Supply – Fading Ads of TriBeCa Tour
© Vincenzo Aiosa
Standard Scale & Supply were a Pittsburgh company with branches in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York & Dallas. In 1901 they were listed among companies that had been in business in New York for 50 years or more. They were located at 136 West Broadway from 1900 to 1915. – Walter Grutchfield
Uptown Correspondent – Iman R. Abdulfattah – Odeon Theatre – 145th Street – Harlem, NYC
© Iman R. Abdulfattah
© Iman R. Abdulfattah
© Iman R. Abdulfattah
In an interview with Harlemite and Manhattan borough historian Celedonia “Cal” Jones, he said he remembered sneaking into the Odeon in the late 1930s to watch movies as a child. Cal, who lived two or three blocks north of the Odeon, said, “When you go shopping for theatres to sneak into, you perfected your talents on the local theatres. We had it down pretty pat.” Cal recounted, “One of us snuck in and he’d come around and crack the door and the rest of us would crawl upstairs.” Sometimes he would “back into the theatre,” which is the remarkable talent of walking backward while people were exiting. Cal also remembers that the Odeon sets of jelly glasses to the first hundred paying customers who got in the theatre or some other kind of promotional gift. Usually the Odeon showed a double feature but not first-run films. “After it hit downtown, it would work its way uptown, so for the area, they were first runs.” Cal’s buddy Sonny Neal remembered the newsreels between the films. Sonny said they would show the black newsreels after the general newsreels, like the clips about the all-black troops during World War II. Cal remembers he had heard the theatre once had live vaudeville performances, but by the time he was “coming up” in Harlem, during its renaissance, the Odeon was a straight movie house.
In a letter written by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee to restore the Apollo Theatre (formerly known as the Hurtig & Seaman’s New Burlesque Theatre), the following information about the Odeon Theatre was provided:
Brecher and Schiffman were white businessmen who played a major role in the history of Harlem’s entertainment industry as owner-operators of a number of Harlem’s leading theatres featuring black entertainers. Brecher was owner of several Broadway and Harlem clubs and theatres, while Schiffman was a theatre operator and motion picture distributor. They first became business partners in 1920, converting the Odeon Theatre (1910, Van Buren & Lavelle, 256 West 145th Street) to show motion pictures.
Many of the old theatres and movie houses had elaborate organs that were played in between vaudeville acts or during films, which up to then were still silent films. There is an interesting connection between the owners of the Odeon and a young jazz organist by the name of Thomas Waller. While reading some selected passages from the book Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf by Barry Singer, required reading for a course at the Center for the Humanities at Washington University at St. Louis about the American poet and jazz lyricist Andy Razaf, I was happy to discover that his musical partner, twenty year- old Thomas “Fats” Waller, was employed by Brecher and Schiffman.
Wildly unsuited to a wife who’d finally divorced her unreliable musician-husband in late 1923, and still sorely missing his late mother, young Waller reveled in the camaraderie of musicians, loving to jam with them, loving to drink with them. The orchestra rows surrounding his organ post at the Lincoln Theatre often were filled with musician friends drinking in Waller’s astonishing keyboard talent, passing the bottle, laughing with him as he often provided outrageous musical accompaniment to the action onscreen. Willie “the Lion” Smith would later suggest that Waller’s unsuspected, painful shyness was the cause of his early alcoholism. Everyone, including young Waller, loved the person he became boozed up. The drinking escalated rapidly.
In March 1925 Marie Downes, owner of the Lincoln Theatre, informed her organist that she had decided to sell the old film house to Frank Schiffman and his partner Leo Brecher—two white men, operators of the Odeon Theatre on 145th Street and both the Harlem Opera House and Loew’s Seventh Avenue burlesque theatre on 124th Street, who were about to attempt an ambitious consolidation of black vaudeville entertainment in Harlem.
The news stung Waller, who viewed the Lincoln in much the same light as he did the revered memory of his late mother. Schiffman and Brecher, however, cordially brought the young keyboardist up to their offices, where they openly informed him of their plans to turn the Lincoln into a straight movie house while transferring the old theatre’s successful vaudeville programming to the larger Lafayette, which, after undergoing continual policy reconfigurations over the previous few years, was for the moment a straight movie house presenting only sporadic stage shows. The two men then offered Waller the Lafayette organist’s job for $50 a week (double his Lincoln Theatre salary), crowning the news with the information that if he accepted, Waller could expect to play a Robert Marston–model organ at the Lafayette, the first grand organ to be found in Harlem.
– Excerpt from The Fading Ads of New York City (History Press, 2011) © Frank H. Jump
Fading Ads of NYC – Reviewed by Ann Kroon, Stockholm University for VISUAL STUDIES – Routledge
Is this what urban authenticity is all about; letting the material layers of yesterday live on in peace and speak their wisdoms to us through their decayed beauty? This question comes to mind as soon as I start to look at the beautiful photographs in Frank Jump’s Fading Ads of New York City. Jump has devoted 15 years to scouting these ads, some of them more than 100 years old. Fading ads, also called ghost or vintage ads, are old advertisements painted directly onto exterior walls, which have then been protected from the elements by either new adjacent buildings or a favorable northern exposure. Since discovering his first faded ad in 1997, Jump has carried out his urban visual archaeology all over the city. The book showcases his earliest work, a ‘double documentation of obsolescence’ (34) through the use of now distinct Kodachrome positive slides, rendering gorgeous vintage-style photographs. Featuring essays by an urban historian and a visual anthropologist among others, the book is divided into commercial sections of ads such as ‘Breweriana’, ‘Music and Entertainment’ and ‘Savings, Loans and Fur Vaults’ making the book an excellent urban visual lexicon of bygone companies and ad painters. Moreover, Jump contextualises many of the photographs through excerpts of interviews and anecdotes, as well as citing what others have written about his work in blogs and magazines. In his photographs, Jump puts his finger on the escaping sense of urban authenticity, pinpointing these mundane material layers of the city (the ads were often seen as vulgar nuisances in their own time) that have survived the forces of urban gentrification, these visual winks from those that came before us.
Jump also briefly touches upon the problem of conservation, or rather, the problem with conservation: should these signs be restored to ‘their former glory’ (58), or should they be respected and praised precisely because of their decayed beauty? This philosophical question ties in with the book’s overall aim of not just documenting the fading ads, but also narrating, through his own words and others’, Jump’s personal story with being diagnosed with HIV at the age of 26. The struggle to live with this disease for more than half his life becomes interwoven with the existential dimensions of the fading ads, seen by Jump ‘as signs of life, metaphors for survival’ (87). The ads have survived through the decades, and like many people with HIV and aids, often under adverse circumstances and against all modernist and commercial odds. The ‘sense of urgency’ (28) with which Jump has traced and documented these ads rings with the urgency he must have felt in the face of his illness, giving an edge to his work, reminding us that all dimensions of the city go together.We and our bodies are also material parts of the big urban machine and we will all fade away.
This interwoven approach makes for a rewarding read;however, it is also that which fully packs and somewhat clutters the book, making it difficult to sometimes focus and follow its thematic threads. The book wants to stand on two legs, but once in a while it doesn’t seem to know which one. Above all, I keep wishing for more space for Jump’s beautiful images, instead of their too often being crammed into pages with words. Generally, I would have preferred more emphasis on the photos in the layout, and for the texts to be slimmed down and more stringently edited. In addition, I would have loved to see these old-school Kodachrome photographs reprinted larger on sturdier and less glossy paper (think e.g. Camilo José Vergara’s visual work in American Ruins (1999)). However, I can without doubt understand the editing dilemmas (and costs) that must have gone into laying out the book from such an extensive material, and these are marginal comments that should not overshadow the fact that Jump’s book is a devoted and impressive personal project that has regaled us with a rich visual history of an often overlooked part of the mundane urban tapestry. – Ann Kroon, Stockholm University – Published online: 03 May 2013.
Visual Studies – Volume 28, Issue 1, 2013
Fading ads of New York City
by Frank Jump. Foreword by Andrew Irving,
Introduction by William Stage, Epilogue
by Kathleen Hulser.
Charleston and London: The History Press, 2011,
216 pages
ISBN: 1-609-49438-5 (hardback)
Reviewed by Ann Kroon, Stockholm University
REFERENCE
Vergara, C. J. 1999. American Ruins. New York: The Monacelli Press.
© 2013 Ann Kroon
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2013.765249
