A recent building teardown at 2nd Avenue and East 72nd Street revealed this partial ad for Pearline Soap. Though Pearline is represented in a great number of color advertising cards from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, I have been able to find little about the company in my admittedly short time spent web spelunking. The best I can do is say that Pearline soap, developed by a James Pyle, began appearing as a product around 1877, was trademarked on November 21, 1899, and continued to be in active use well after the rights to the name was purchased by Procter & Gamble around 1912. Interestingly, P&G had a massive complex in the Mariners Harbor section of Staten Island, so large that the area was briefly known as Port Ivory.
You can see that the corner building that was torn down has a great deal of wood construction. Unfortunately, most of the ad was whitewashed at some time in the past, though “Pearline” in blue and white can clearly be made out. At one time the ad must have been as spectacular as the Reckitts Blue ad that popped up after a teardown in Prospect Heights in 1998, first documented by Frank Jump; what comes down must go up, and that ad was duly covered by a building soon enough.
At lower left you can discern a version of this marvelously detailed Pearline publication ad that appeared in 1882, so we can infer that the building it is on went up at around that time.
Building photos by Jonathan Rickard
As always, “comment…as you see fit.” I earn a small payment when you click on any ad on the site. Take a look at the new JOBS link in the red toolbar at the top of the page on the desktop version, as I also get a small payment when you view a job via that link.
10/28/23
6 comments
If you scroll along Second Avenue on Google Street View you alternate between June 2022 views in which the corner building is intact, and October 2022 views in which it’s mostly gone.
The Port Ivory name for Staten Island’s northwest corner has existed for over a century and is still in use. I possess a NYC street map atlas (Mapping in America, published in 2023) that shows Port Ivory as the neighborhood name.
Indeed, the name won’t be forgotten. Proctor and Gamble’s Port Ivory facility was a huge factory complex that operated from 1907 until 1991, when its soap making operation moved to Mexico. It manufactured many consumer products in addition to Ivory Soap – Crisco shortening, Tide detergent, and Citrus Hill Orange Juice were three such examples.
In 1958, my fifth grade class visited the P&G plant because we were learning about soap manufacturing.
Below is a link about Port Ivory’s history:
https://www.silive.com/news/2020/06/flashback-port-ivory-home-of-the-floating-soap.html
Lived a few blocks east of Port Ivory in the late ’70s-early ’80s. The air always smelled like laundry detergent, and not in a good way. Between that and the planes taking off from nearby Newark Airport, that wasn’t my favorite Staten Island home. Of course, the plant is long gone and completely demolished now.
I literally e-mailed you two pictures of this site in the last two weeks. Unfortunately, your e-mail wasn’t working. I’m glad to see the pictures!
Kevin@forgotten-ny.com doesn’t work, please send correspondence to kevinjudewalsh@gmail.com
Great NYC advertising history, It should be preserved somehow.