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
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10/28/23