By Michael Reel
Ghost signs are the ads for obsolete products and companies that disappeared decades ago. Careful observers in cities and towns can spot these signs that are hiding in plain sight.
Frank Mastropolo is a journalist and photographer whose 2019 book Ghost Signs: Clues to Downtown New York’s Past documented the lost ads of Manhattan below 14th Street. On July 26, Schiffer Books published Ghost Signs 2: Clues to Uptown’s New York’s Past to cover the rest of the island.
The beautifully photographed signs and the stories that explain their backgrounds reveal a New York City long forgotten. The Horn & Hardart Automat, Gimbel’s department store, and Studebaker cars are some of more that 100 ghost signs. A fascinating selection of archival photos is also included.
Ghost Signs 2 is a must-read for history buffs, urban archaeologists and fans of graphic art and advertising. Open to any page and be immersed in New York’s past of streetcars, vaudeville theaters and snake-oil cures.
Here Mastropolo shares an excerpt from the book on a few signs spotted in Harlem.
While Harlem is known as the center of African American culture in New York and perhaps the entire country, the neighborhood has been home to many ethnic groups. Native Americans farmed the flatlands before the Dutch established the settlement of New Haarlem, after the Dutch city of Haarlem, in 1660. After the Civil War, Italian and Jewish immigrants moved here.
By the early twentieth century, Blacks arrived as part of the Great Migration to escape the Jim Crow South and find better jobs. Puerto Rican and Latin American migration began after World War I. African Americans began to leave Harlem after World War II for the outer boroughs in a trend that has continued. Gentrification began in the early 1990s. The influx of new businesses on 125th Street, Harlem’s “Main Stem,” helped revitalize the neighborhood.
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was born here, a fertile period for African American artists, writers, actors, and musicians. During the Harlem Renaissance, some of America’s greatest jazz musicians, poets, artists, and writers emerged from the nightclubs, theaters, and dance halls of Central Harlem. The period ended in the early 1930s when the neighborhood was devastated by the job losses of the Great Depression.
The Odeon 145th Street Theatre in Central Harlem was built in 1910 and presented vaudeville shows. In the early 1920s Frank Schiffman and Leo Brecher, later owners of the Apollo Theater, converted the theater to a movie house. The Odeon 145th Street Theatre was named to differentiate it from the Odeon Theatre on the Lower East Side.
“Halfway up the block there was a small fleabag for down-and-outs, the Hotel Harmony,” wrote novelist Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy. The building opened in 1929 as the headquarters of the Explorers’ Club of New York, where it boasted the world’s largest collection of books on exploration. The club moved to Central Park West in 1932 and the Hotel Harmony debuted in 1935.
The Hotel Harmony’s faded and obscured sign reads, “Hotel Harmony, Where Living Is a Pleasure. Single & Double Rooms, Permanent, Transient.” The hotel was open until about 1966. Columbia University purchased the building in the late 1960s and converted it into Harmony Hall, a student dormitory.
Ghost Signs 2: Clues to Uptown New York’s Past is available on Amazon.
