Wallet card at Disc-O-Mat

If taking photos of these kinds of signs is "collecting", then this one was my "white whale" for a long time. I knew this sign was hiding behind a billboard on 7th Avenue and 36th Street, right past where I would walk from Penn Station to my office every day. I knew that every once in a while the billboard would come down for a short time, revealing the sign, before going back up. I would walk by every day to see if the sign was revealed, with no luck. I even one time came in the morning just as some workers were up there taking the ad off. I stayed for 20 minutes but it turned out they were just taking the overlaying ad off, but not the backing of the billboard.

In March 2020 I stopped going into the city for work. At some point in 2021, I noticed pictures of this sign going up on a couple of websites, though they were undated so I didn't know if the photos were new or old. In December 2021 I was finally back in the city and would have a chance to see if it was finally revealed. I didn't go in the morning because it was in the opposite direction of the Pepsi sign I wanted to capture, and that one would be harder in the dark. I would have liked to capture this one in the light as well, but the area is lit well enough that you can still read the sign.

Disc-O-Mat was a chain of stores that sold, as the sign says, cheap records. They lasted for a few years in the NY/NJ area. These days the sign is probably better remembered than the store.