SADLY, the last time I was able to get a photo of this enamel and metal sign on Auburn Place in Fort Greene was in 2016. It was paired with a similar sign for North Elliott Place in Fort Greene at Cumberland Hospital; you can see them in a Google Street View from that year. This was an out of the way locale north of Myrtle Avenue, and the usually relentless Department of Transportation missed them. The DOT may have been tipped off to their location by a previous appearance in Forgotten New York. The next time I swung by, they had disappeared. I hope a collector has them.
One by one, Brooklyn’s remaining enamel street signs I had spotted on Homecrest Court and Coney Island Avenue in Homecrest, Dahl Court in Bensonhurst, and Ivy Hill Road east of Vandervoort Avenue in East Williamsburg… far-flung locales all… have been snuffed out by the DOT, which finally found their hiding places.
These enamel and metal signs, with raised lettering in Highway Gothic, first appeared in the 1950s and were the first to be color coded by borough. The colors matched the ones that later appeared on larger vinyl signs beginning in 1964: white on black for Brooklyn; white on blue for Bronx; blue on white for Queens; and black on yellow for Manhattan and Staten Island. These signs seemed most prevalent in Brooklyn and Staten Island and I never saw one in Manhattan, but I was pre-teen when they were dominant and my Manhattan exploring was limited to when one or both parents took me into Manhattan on the RR train for one purpose or another.
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6/12/24
1 comment
That GSV link is of an alleyway in London.