OLD SIGNBOARDS

Evening Star, Issue 22365, 15 June 1936, Page 12

OLD SIGNBOARDS

REMINDERS OF THE FAST City dwellers who take for granted electrical “ speculators ” seven stories high and flamboyant billboard stickers that can be read for half a mile may, find it difficult to imagine a day when a diminutive wooden horse, a slight hand-carved figure holding forth a bunch of grapes, or even a life-sized wooden Indian in war paint and feathers could make an impressiom on the commercial life of the town, writes John Markland, in the ‘ New York Times.’ But the exhibit recently set up at the Museum of the City of New York to depict the growth of retail trade in the city gives space to a number of such figures. Here, as in Europe, such trade symbols—as well as signs on _ which emblematical devices were ' painted—were used until well into the nineteenth-cen-tury. The butcher exhibited a symbolical red poker or black bull, the baker a sheaf of wheat or a loaf of bread. Taverns and public houses went in for elaborately-painted signs, of the type favoured in England, featuring heraldic devices or characteristic emblems.- The “ Red Lion,” the “ Boar’s Head,” the “King’s Arms,” and the “Half. Moon” were familiar landmarks in Colonial America: they are collectors’ items to-day. In an era when only a small part of the population could read, when street* twisted and turned and houses were not numbered, such signs and device* served useful purposes. But New York, as she assumed cosmopolitan ~ airs, quickly discarded the old and traditional. By 1870, according to a writer in the ‘Atlantic Monthly ’ of that era, who had just made an inspection tour of the city’s signs, most of the trade symbols of the rude, hand-made variety had already disappeared. Here and there he found a signboard adorned with a painted wheat sheaf, or with two boots—one male and one femalepainted in bright yellow against a blue background. , , Of the old, elaborately-decorated - tavern signs he could find only a scant handful; one or two Shakespeares, a Golden Swan, a battered George Washington. Jewellers’ clocks and the three golden balls of the pawnbroker were common. There was an abundance, too, of cigar store Indians, of Turks smoking long, slender pipes, of ScottisH Highlanders with snuff boxes. Other figures—fat, grimacying Pucks, dancing negro boys, and handsome English “ swells ’’—were to be found in front of luggage shops, china houses, and variety stores. ~ x , _ Even at that date, however, the New Yorker’s lore ''of the spectacular wa* asserting itself, according to the writer. Giant gilded eagles were observed “ high up on the cornice of some five,story building” on lower. Broadway, or other main thoroughfares,, holding umbrellas, baskets, or other items of trade. Gigantic pipes and huge gilded, double-barrelled shotguns (everything jappears to have been gilded in those ’Says) were affixed to building fronts., i Large artificial limbs, products l of *' •mechanical art to which the war gave impetus,” were much, in evidence, as were dentistry displays featuring large jaws of revolving cushions and gilt mo* lars suspended above the sidewalks. To-day wooden Indians and their motley company are found only in museum* or in private collections. _ Tavern sign* are seen here and there in front of tea “shoppes” and restaurants, but they are usually obvious copies of the traditional signs. Occasionally one sees » hand-made boot doing duty before % shoemaker’s shop, but modern Lootmakers’ signs, as well as those -used by hat cleaners, oculists, and other small tradesmen, are almost invariably or machine-made sameness, wired for neon or electricity. _ - . Stuffed bears and bisons, observed in front of any furriers’ shops by the reporter of the ’seventies, are aeen no more on Manhattan trade thoroughfares. The artificial limbs and th# realistic dental displays also have disappeared. Druggists’ pestle-and-mor. tar exhibits, common in the ’seventies, are found now only in a few shops, notably along Madison Avenue and m Greenwich Village. The three golden balls of the pawnbroker, said to have been adapted from the family crest of the Medicis, patron* of goldsmiths in medieval Italy, ar# seen to-day, but not in great number*. The current fashion is to paint the emblems on windows of the shop. On Chambers street one may still see * gigantic double-barrelled shotgun, *overtising a firearms dealer.