KELLOBE MACHINE SHOP, CYPRESS HILLS

NOT a whole lot of “faded ads” I found in the early days of Forgotten NY survive, but a pair on Jamaica Avenue between Marginal Street East and Vermont Avenue near Evergreens Cemetery and the Jackie Robinson Parkway on a small brick building are still there today, though I selected a photo I obtained in 2007 and enlarged it a bit, hence the reduced photo quality. The ads on either side of the building survive but have faded to the degree that older ads underneath them have started to show through.

When I first saw the ad I thought, “Kellobe, an unusual name.” In fact it’s so unusual that it doesn’t exist as far as I know (any Kellobes out there? Comments are open). Instead, it’s a portmanteau of two names. Let Frank Loeber explain over at Frank Jump’s Fading Ad:

My uncle owned this small machine shop in which my father worked. He came over before World War [II] and started this business with a person Kelly [actually Keller] who I never met. The combination of [Keller] and Loeber was Kellobe Machine Co. This mostly a prototype shop making new pieces for mass production. This and many a shop like it [were] breeding grounds for inventions and jobs.

This is at the west end of Jamaica Avenue, a road that could be said to continue out the Orient Point at the east end of Long Island, if you count the entire length of NYS Highway 25. In fact if you look at a map, Jamaica Avenue continues west as well, as East New York Avenue and Lincoln Road, all the way to Prospect Park. However, traffic can’t proceed along it in a through fashion because of one-way restrictions here and there.

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11/11/24