This ad for a Woodside “Beauty Center” visible from the Manhattan-bound #7 train platform at 61st-Woodside gets just a bit more faded each year. I do remember, though, that the…

Gary Fonville found a palimpsest of painted-on-glass signs at Bushwick Avenue and Moffat Street, GROCERY and EX-LAX, THE CHOCOLATED LAXATIVE. Not sure which came first. I wonder  what gastrointestinal medication…

Gary Fonville made quite a find on West 145th at Frederick Douglass Boulevard (8th Avenue) as an ad for for the former Jack Sobel pawnshop (“loan office”) around the corner…

Somehow I have overlooked this pair of painted ads on the NW corner of Fresh Pond Road and Eliot Avenue. The ads are by the same signpainter and are flogging…

This mostly obliterated painted sign can be seen traveling south on the Grand Concourse from Kingsbridge Road. It appears that there are a variety of signs here, painted on top…

A quasar, which stands for “quasi-stellar” is a super-bright area in the center of a galaxy being swallowed by a black hole, emitting tremendous amounts of radioelectric energy. Some quasars…

Stenciled signs for the “chocolated laxative” appeared frequently on drugstore windows frequently in the early to mid-20th Century, and several more can be found concealed under newer awnings, or in…

A very faded building ad on Jamaica Avenue near 161st Street advertises the department store once billed as Jamaica’s largest. Simon, Louis and Moses Plaut opened their first department store…

A recent building teardown at 43rd Avenue and Hunter Street has revealed this decades-old wall ghost. The ST in the exchange stands for STillwell, STerling or STagg, I’m unsure which.…

For some time now there has been talk about whether this wall mural at West Broadway and Reade Street, which has been there since I began essaying FNY in 1998,…

The “Hot Bird” chicken franchise originated in the mid-1970s in Brooklyn, with three prominent, yet simply designed, painted ads scattered around western Brooklyn. The barb-b-que franchise clucked its last in…

The National Biscuit Company was formed in 1898 by a merger of the midwest American Bakeries and the eastern New York Biscuit Company, while these companies, in turn, had been…