Masback Hardware was started in 1875 as a hardware retailer, and eventually shifted to wholesale. By the 1930s, their best product was the Red Diamond Axe. The popularity of their products led to them taking a large factory space at 330 Hudson Street in Manhattan, where they operated until moving to New Jersey in 1979. The company went out of business in 1996.
You can still see traces of the old Masback signs on the outside of the building.
One building being torn down can lead to the ghost of another building being revealed. Such was the case on Main Street in Hempstead, NY. There has not been a delicatessen in this spot in a long time, certainly within the past 20 years. There's also the word "Beer" and the word "Shed" next to each other, but I am thinking they may be from two different signs. (I think it's beer? Open to other interpretations.)
The Hotel Colborne was constructed on Washington Place in Greenwich Village in 1915. By 1960 the name had changed to the Village Plaza Hotel, and around that time this sign was painted on the side of the building, with the note in the blue stripe that it was air conditioned. By this time, it had devolved from a luxurious tourist hotel to a single-room-occupancy welfare hotel. In 1967, one of the residents and her hippie boyfriend were killed in what were known as the "Groovy Murders". The comments section for the post on this hotel on the Ephemeral New York blog are a fascinating discussion on the people involved in that incident from those who were actually living in the Village as runaway teens at that time. In recent years, the building has become co-op apartments, but the old Village Plaza sign remains.
Revisiting one of my earliest wallet card photos with a big update:
You may be familiar with the famous Macy's building on 34th Street, which until a few years ago was the largest store in the world (and is still the largest in the US). Interestingly, the huge red shopping bag that says "Macy's" is on the one part of the block that Macy's does not actually own. Around 1901, R.H. Macy decided to move his store to 34th street, he quietly started buying up all of the property on the block so that he could build his superstore. However, one of his rivals found out and bought the property on the corner, with the idea that he would sell it to Macy and purchase their prior location. However, Macy decided to just build around the property instead of giving in to the guy who bought the corner property. In the 1920s, that building changed hands, and Macy's began renting the top floors of the building for advertising purposes, but never bought that last parcel on 34th street, currently home to Sunglass Hut.
The big update:
The owner of the building now is planning to lease that space to another retailer, and recently got permission from the city to replace the Macy's signage with new digital billboards.
Before we get to the new photos, a brief retrospective:
1906: The brand new Macy's building dominates the corner holdout.
1940: The building is largely covered by ads.
1964: Color postcard
2015: My wallet card photo. By this time Macy's had settled into the "red shopping bag" design.
2026: Today! 34th street side. These top three stories had been blocked for public view since the 1920s. They were unoccupied for the past century as there was no means for dual exit with the windows blocked.
Broadway side: It's such a spooky feeling seeing these newly revealed unused floors. Kind of like digging up a grave site.
This is a really cool one.
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.
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+.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not my best photo, but here you can see a building with Third National Bank in big letters above the second floor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
