Sometimes I see something that looks like it might be an old sign, so I take a photo and then look it up later. Sometimes it's not as old as I thought. Other times I get lucky.
Yesterday I was in Green Acres Mall, which was built in 1956 as an open-air mall, with a roof added in 1970. Like many malls, it used to be thriving but it's well past it's prime.
Some work was being done above one of the stores and some old signage was revealed. All I could see was something that looked like a B and the word Stylepride, which I wasn't familiar with. I had not idea how old the sign was; I figured if I was lucky maybe it was from the 1990s. (The sign, or rather the labelscar from the sign, can be seen in the gray band above the American Eagle Outfitters. A pipe partially obscures the word Stylepride. Enlarging the photo makes the sign easier to read.)
It turns out that Stylepride was a line of women's shoes popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but appears to have been discontinued in the 1970s. This turns out to have been Burt's (or Burt's Stylepride) which was a shoe store in the mall. The only references I can find to Burt's are from the early 1960s, so this sign clearly goes back to the early, open-air days at the mall.
Here is an image I found of a Burt's ad from 1961, from Newspapers.com:
I bet that mall was quite something before the roof was added.
ReplyDeleteIt's cool to find historical stuff like this buried under stuff... only to be discovered during remodels.
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