Wallet Card with a phone number that has been defunct for over 100 years

This is a really cool one.

This coal chute cover on East 9th Street was crafted by Empire City Iron Works, who included their phone number, CIRCLE 1500. According to research by the signage expert Walter Grutchfield, Empire City Iron Works was founded in 1907, and from 1915 to 1919 was located on Manhattan's 8th Avenue. In late 1919 or early 1920 the business moved to Long Island City, Queens, where it got a new number. Over 100 years later, the business remains at that Queens location. Pretty cool that there is still a remnant from a phone number that hasn't worked in over a century, and even cooler that the business still exists today.
 

Wallet Card at McNeice

On my last wallet card post, Fuji mentioned that he likes when the business name is embedded in the ground. I do too. This one is in a commercial office building in West Hempstead. Unfortunately, I could not find anything about who or what McNeice was. Nice sign, though.

 

Wallet Card at Baker Brush

This was the receiving entrance (rear, freight entrance) for Baker Brush, a prominent manufacturer of paintbrushes c. 1915-1975. Old Baker brushes can be found on eBay today for $100+.

 

Wallet Card at Scheff's Work Clothes

In last week's wallet card photo, I noted that there was a painted sign on the side of the car dealership-turned-movie theater-turned office building. Here is that sign, which if you zoom in, has the word "clothes" still visible on the lower right. That sign was for Scheff's Work Clothes, which was next door to the old Nassau Garage, in the space occupied by the Total Wireless and it's neighbors in the photo.

In the pavement at the entrance to one of the stores, you can still see the sign for Scheff's, which moved out of this location in 1978.

Here is a photo of this location in 1960. As you can see, the word "clothes" is the same. However, when you look at the current sign, the large word ends with an N, so it's not Scheff's. The business that owned Scheff's was called Carlson-Scheff's, but I'm not sure that's Carlson either. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out what store came after Scheff's, but I'm guessing that store may have painted over "Scheff's" but kept "clothes".

 

 

Wallet Card at Nassau Garage

This building on Main Street in Freeport, NY has the sign Nassau Garage. This was originally built in the 1920s as a Packard Automobiles dealer. The Packard dealership moved out shortly after, and became a movie theater which went by various names through the 1980s. 

Now it is the site of various businesses including a jeweler and a barber shop. The website Cinema Treasures has a photo of this building when it was still a movie theater in the 1970s. In that photo you can see the sign for a neighboring businesses on the side of the movie theater. That sign is still there and will be the subject of another Wallet Card post.

Wallet Card at Datz Moving & Storage

Another example of a pretty old sign that looks really old. This sign for Datz Moving & Storage on Vestry Street in Manhattan looks like it could be 1930s, but the business was at this site from 1969 to 1974. The business did not last very long but the signage sure has. You can even see remnants of an older sign behind the Datz sign. Looks like the word "Famous"? Also barely visible above are the remnants of another business, Regina Products.

 

Wallet card with a 25 year old Coca-Cola can

This is not one of my oldest discoveries but it is one of my more fun ones. This weekend I was playing with my son in his elementary school playground, and he showed me where an old fence got taken down where a building had been torn down on the other side. This exposed a layer of garbage wedged between the remaining chain link fence and some construction rubble. Some of the items looked like they might be old, it was hard to tell. We both had fun exploring. This was the most promising item we found.

Bleached from the sun but still showing some red, and interestingly some green.  

I had no idea if it was from last week or last century, but decided it was worth taking a wallet card photo. My son had fun holding the card for the photo.

A few years ago this would have been an extremely difficult puzzle to solve, maybe looking up hundreds of coke cans to hopefully get a match. It is 2026, however, so I uploaded the top photo to ChatGPT, went back and forth with prompts a few times, and found the design in question!

According to Packaging Pedia, this is the design Coca-Cola used from 1999-2003. If you go back to the top photo, you can see part of the word "enjoy", and it turns out the green is from the design showing the old soda bottle. There are a few cans for sale on eBay which also peg this design from that time period. While not terribly old or rare, it's a lot older than my son and we both had a lot of fun exploring some old stuff and then looking it up later. (And yes, we threw out the can so no kids would get hurt on the sharp edges.)

And if you think about it, this can of soda was enjoyed when Jesse Orosco, Jamie Moyer and Julio Franco were active major leaguers, and only got thrown out this week.
 

 

Wallet Card in Nashville: Third National Bank

Not my best photo, but here you can see a building with Third National Bank in big letters above the second floor.

This 12-story building was Nashville's first skyscraper when it opened in 1904 as the First National Bank Building. It went through a variety of main tenants until the Third National Bank moved in during the 1930s. Over the years, Third National grew into one of the area's largest banks. In the 1980s it was acquired by SunTrust, and the Third National brand was phased out in the 1990s, at which time this became a hotel, which it still is today.
 

Wallet Card in Nashville: Coca-Cola sign

In the same outdoor mall as the Yorke Men's Shop sign, I saw this Coca-Cola sign. Again, I had my doubts that it was authentically vintage but snapped a wallet card photo just in case.

A 2009 blog post on the Fading Ad blog (by Frank Jump, one of the premier chroniclers of ghost signs) shows a sign that looks noticeably older and dirtier than the one here. Was this an old sign that was cleaned up, or just a new one to replace the old one? Who knows. Seeing the cool Planters Peanuts sign on the back of the building, I wish I'd walked in that direction.

Wallet Card in Nashville: Yorke Men's Shop

When I knew I was going to Nashville I did some research on ghost signs in the area to look for. One of the most prominent is one for Yorke Men's Shop. As a much smaller city than New York, there aren't as many people documenting these signs, and one post I saw about this sign doubted that this store had ever existed, so I didn't even plan to take a photo, but I ended up passing by it and so I decided to, just in case it was real. Upon further research, it seems quite possible it is.

Unfortunately the van blocks part of the sign - "If it's new, if it's sharp - we have it." This is in an outdoor mall called the Arcade that was initially opened in the 1920s. Looking it up again, I found this Instagram post from a user named mcarsten with a photograph of the store in 1973, from an article about crime in the Arcade. In the past few years the Arcade, like much of Nashville, has been refurbished and made more tourist-friendly. This sign was revealed in 2019, and it wouldn't be out of character for a fake, retro-looking sign. Mcarsten suggests that the sign had been covered with wood rather than painted over, perhaps explaining why it was in such good shape.
 

Wallet card in Nashville: Acme Farm Supply

This building, built in 1890, housed various businesses before Acme Feed and Hatchery moved in in 1943. In 1965 the business changed it's name to Acme Farm Supply. The business closed in 1999, and the building was vacant until 2013, when a bar/music venue was opened on the site, one of many catering to the tourists on Nashville's Broadway. What I really like here are the Purina privilege signs on this side of the building.

 

Wallet card in Nashville: Kress

I was recently in Nashville for work and had the chance to snap a few wallet card photos. This is an old Kress 5 & 10 store. Kress was a nationwide chain - there's even a former Kress location in Upper Manhattan I should get out to at some point. The first Kress opened in Memphis in 1896. The chain at one point reached 246 stores around the country. The last Kress closed in 1981. 

This particular location was the site of some prominent sit-ins in 1960. It is now the Kress Condominiums. 

 

Wallet Card at Freeport Bedding

This one's hard to see in the photo, but under the awning for The Mattress Factory in Freeport, NY, are the remains of letters that once said Freeport Bedding.

The only reference that I can find to this store being called Freeport Bedding is from a 1947 newspaper ad. By the 1990s it was Island Bedding and soon after the Mattress Factory. So this lettering could date from anywhere from the 1940s to the 1990s, I suppose.

 

Wallet card at Grand Central Terminal in Grand Central Terminal

I had a little time before my train this evening so I stopped by the NYC Transit Museum's little annex/store there. They always have some kind of exhibit. This time it was a model train set. The back half was a standard Lionelville town, but the front was various NYC locations, including CBGBs, the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square, and the Lenox Lounge in Harlem. 

I thought it would be a fun little wallet card photo to show Grand Central at Grand Central. Just like in real life, the MetLife building rises behind the famous station. In 2018, MetLife moved away from this logo to a less bold design, and replaced the logo that looks like the one you see here.

 

Wallet Card at a Waldbaum's that burned down 60 years ago

 

Waldbaum's was a major Long Island supermarket chain that went bankrupt in 2015, the same year I started doing wallet cards. There are still plenty of Waldbaum's remnants that felt too new to include as wallet card entries. 

This one is more interesting, though. I had passed by this strip of stores on Broadway in Hewlett, NY hundreds of times without noticing the back. It's pretty faded but the WALDBAUM'S is still fairly legible. It took a fair amount of internet detective work to figure out that this Waldbaum's was destroyed by fire in 1965. A New York Times article mentioned that it was "suspicious". Articles from other more local papers are behind paywalls, but I wonder if it's suspicious that another, larger Waldbaum's had been opened in the same town a few years earlier? Whatever is the case, it's cool that this sign survived a big fire and still is visible 60 years later.

Wallet Card with a Deadly Disease

I noticed some empty spaces for advertising posters on Track 18 at Penn Station. I've had surprisingly good luck with really old flyers that have been hidden underneath ads, stuck on for good with adhesives that are no doubt banned today. This one is a weird one.

Not much to go on but just a hunch that these were old. I actually was thinking they were probably just modern rat poison warnings, but it's actually more interesting.

While there's a lot to dislike about modern Google search, one great thing is that Google Images now automatically searches for text in photos, not just in the website the photo is on. I tried googling "Deadly Disease Stay Away From", with no luck in the regular results but a perfect match in Images.

This is a photograph by acclaimed photographer Louis Clyde Stoumen, called Deadly Disease, Times Square, New York. There are copies of the photo in the museums of Amherst University, who date the photo as 1980, and Duke University, who date it 1978. 

I couldn't find any more information about who was posting these flyers about tuberculosis around New York City in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but it's cool to know that at least a little bit of these 45+ year old amateur flyers are still visible today. 

Wallet Card at the Turkish & Arabian Coffee Company

Some surviving 1930s signage from the Turkish & Arabian Coffee Company. Insert T&A joke here.

The coffee company left this site some time in the 1950s or possibly 1960s. In more recent years the building was converted into a single-family townhouse, owned until recently by former Gap CEO Mickey Drexler. Drexler sold it to an unnamed company in 2023 for $24 million, well below the initial asking price of $30 million. Here are some photos of the inside if you don't live in a $24 million townhouse and are curious about what they look like.
 

Wallet Card at the 9 train

The 9 train hasn't run since 2005. It covered most of the same territory as the 1 and there wasn't enough ridership to sustain it. Yet Penn Station still has a sign for the 9 train on the 8th Avenue side. Most likely the sticker that was covering the sign came off. Ironically enough it is brighter than the lines that are still active.

 

Wallet Card at Mayon Crating & Shipping

At 27 Desbrosses Street in Tribeca, is a sign that looks really old, and is still pretty old. Mayon Crating & Shipping opened in 1977, when this was still an industrial area, and closed in the early 1990s as the neighborhood shifted to high-end residential apartments.

 

The vestiges of a much older sign can be seen underneath.

Wallet card with Mr. Zip

Here's a wallet card photo I'm really excited about. Mr. Zip! A brief history lesson:

Before World War II there was no uniformity around addressing an envelope. Veteran postal workers were experts in their areas and were able to figure out where each letter should go. Due to wartime shortages of postal workers, a 2-digit postal zone system was created for the 124 largest cities in the U.S., to help inexperienced workers determine where letters should go. After the war, as volumes increased, a better system was needed, so in 1963, two-digit state abbreviations were introduced, and every address in America got the code for their Zone Improvement Plan - ZIP Code!

Two publicize this new innovation, which like every such innovation was resisted by most, the US Postal Service introduced Mr. Zip to help publicize the new codes. Mr. Zip signs were everywhere in US post offices throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, but as ZIP code use normalized, there was no more need for Mr. Zip and he was phased out. Mr. Zip remnants still remain here and there, and I've seen them online from bloggers or people on social media who find Mr. Zip on, for example, an apartment building mail slot.

I'd never seen one in a place that was generally accessible, but quite accidentally ran across one yesterday, one that I had probably passed before but never noticed, in the Farley Post Office above Penn Station, a national landmark and one of the biggest post offices in the US. It's convenient location makes it an easy spot to mail off card packages before going to work. I was passing by an unused counter and a green platform caught my eye. It was attached to the counter so has probably always been there, but I hadn't noticed it before. Guess what was stuck to the platform!

The ZIP code in this case would be 10001. If you notice on top there is a date, but missing the last digit. I thought it might be tough to find it but it's right there on Mr. Zip's Wikipedia page - May 1963! Over the past 62 years there have clearly been some attempts to remove the sticker, but that jet-age adhesive is still going strong! If there are "white whales" in my Wallet Card quests, this was certainly one of them. Finding it yesterday certainly made my day!