© Frank H. Jump
Midtown NYC
Summer Solstice @ NYPL with Frank Jump – Fading Ads of NYC – June 20, 2012
Cynthia Chaldekas, Senior Librarian @ Mid-Manhattan NYPL introduces Frank Jump before his lecture about Fading Ads of NYC © Vincenzo Aiosa
© Vincenzo Aiosa
Frank,
Thank you, a big thank you for taking the time to come to the library and presenting a really terrific program. Your program was like a love letter, incredibly tender and thoughtful and an homage to the process of loss and decay. Through photographs you reveal the beauty to what some would consider the detritus of an urban landscape, instead lush and subtle images come from your hand and eye. There is so much to the city we don’t know and through you and others you bring a heightened appreciation. Last night’s presentation was a real treat. I enjoyed your discussion on of how the photographs connected to your health, your life, even your mother. Looking through the pages of your book was such a pleasure, hearing you in person was extra special. I am so so happy I just by chance heard you on WNYC many months ago and the library was so lucky to have you present. Many many thanks for a great night.
Take care,
Cynthia Chaldekas, Senior Librarian
The New York Public Library
Mid Manhattan Library (3rd fl)
455 5th Ave
NY, NY 10016
(646) 704-4773
Thank you Cynthia for asking me to speak at NYPL. I was truly honored. Thank you everyone for coming out on the hottest day of the year and making it such a successful evening! Best, Frank
Bickford’s – Eighth Avenue & 34th Street – Nathan Tweti – Featured Fade
© Nathan Tweti
David W. Dunlap writes the following about Bickford’s:
If you lived in New York anytime from the 1930’s through the 1960’s, chances are you knew Bickford’s. They were up and down Broadway, on Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Main Street and Jamaica Avenue in Queens.
“Breakfast at Bickford’s is an old New York custom,” a 1964 guidebook said. “In these centrally located, speedy-service, modestly-priced restaurants a torrent of traffic is sustained for a generous span of hours with patrons who live so many different lives on so many different shifts.”
To say the least. The best minds of Allen Ginsberg’s generation “sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s,” he wrote in “Howl.” The Beat Generation muse, Herbert Huncke, practically inhabited the Bickford’s on West 42nd Street. Walker Evans photographed Bickford’s customers, and Andy Warhol rhapsodized about Bickford’s waitresses. Bickford’s make its way into the work of writers as diverse as Woody Allen and William Styron.[i]
“Death (being edged to the doorway): Where’s a good hotel? What am I talking about hotel, I got no money. I’ll go sit in Bickford’s. (He picks up the News).”
—Getting Even, Woody Allen
“How vividly there still lingers on my palate the suety aftertaste of the Salisbury steak at Bickford’s, or Riker’s western omelette, in which one night, nearly swooning, I found a greenish, almost incorporeal feather and a tiny embryonic beak.”
—Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
[i] Dunlap, “Old York,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/nyregion/old-york-look-close-this-ever-new-town-you-will-see-traces-past-peeking-through.html.
Featured Fade – Hit Parade Cigarettes – 7-Up – Koreatown, NYC – M.R. Easton
Old ads uncovered by work on hotel facade, West 32nd Street © M.R. Easton - CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE
I thought you might be interested in these small ads for 7-UP and Hit Parade cigarettes uncovered by ongoing work on the La Quinta Hotel facade in Koreatown (17 W. 32nd street). Not too faded (but damaged a bit). A quick bit of web research shows that in 1957 the Hit Parade changed sponsors from Lucky Strike to a brand named for the show. I’m not sure how long it lasted, but most ads and other references on-line are for 1957 and 1958 only. The La Quinta used to be the Aberdeen Hotel, one of the first to allow unaccompanied women to stay there on the same terms as men. – M.R. Easton
