So, wile visiting my cousin years ago, we noticed a strange thing downtown. Remember way back in the days of dinosaurs, okay maybe the 1900s, “billboards” were sometimes painted directly on the exterior brick walls of buildings, like so: Exampley example.
We saw a building that has the thing backwards. It’s an old ad for 7-Up. I recreated a totally fake version in Photoshop. It pretty much looks like this. I also P-shopped the Banco Popular to make it taller to give a reasonably accurate idea of what the scale of the neighboring buildings are like.
So?
There are probably 5 or 6 more buildings to the right and then the road drops down under a train bridge. The rail line has been there almost as long as the whole town. So given the height of the advertisement and the neighboring buildings (all from the same era), by the time it would be in a car’s rear view mirror, you’d be too far away to see it or it would be obscured.
It does look like another building had at one time been butted up against it. So we were almost wondering if the ad had been painted on an older neighbouring building, then transferred onto the one that’s still standing when it was built later. But that seems silly.
We did consider that, but it makes it damn hard to read. But I was wondering if 7-Up ever did a deliberate campaign that would explain it. I’ve never seen any other ads flipped on purpose, except for small businesses.
And the only reason it caught our attention at all isn’t because it was backwards, but because it was so old and faded and a nice example of a “ghost ad”. If it had been new, we probably would have ignored it as visual clutter, and making your message difficult to decipher is generally not considered good marketing practices.
Putting it backwards might be the kind of thing that would make it stand out from the clutter. You’re familiar enough with the logo to recognize it backwards but putting it backwards makes it different enough that you notice it.
Or maybe traffic patterns have changed since the sign went up. Maybe it used to be a one-way street and the wall was visible from the street but facing the wrong way. So the owners sold the right to paint on the wall cheap and 7up painted it backwards so it would appear normal in mirrors.
I remember vaguely when they did a facelift of downtown Akron, my hometown, that they recovered an old Coke ad from the same period on a wall and decided to restore it. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’d assume this was the same thing, but of an ad that originally ran on the building abutting the wall, which is now demolished. Ads can become landmarks just like anything else, and commercial art from that era is considered by many these days (including yours truly) to be really beautiful. Maybe the city decided to put the ad back up years after the fact but the building was gone, or they wanted to capture the ad even after the building had been knocked down.
I don’t think I seen a backwards one, but 7-up has played some upside down tricks with their logo from time to time. I have a set of Uncola glasses, which are upside-down knock-offs of the classic Coke glass, except the opening is on the narrow end. They briefly toyed with a different flavored “dn-L” drink, too.
My cousin (who I was visiting) was an architecture student at the time and had done a project on the history of the town’s urban planning, and told me at the time we were looking at it, that it was impossible for that to have ever been viable due to the train stuff (there used to be more warehouse-type industrial buildings on the other side of the tracks. You might have been able to see the ad from the warehouses, but I don’t think it would be recognizable at that distance.
Great theory, but no. There are no skyscrapers within 10-15 blocks and there never have been any reflective buildings in that area. The nearest reflective skyscrapers (the 10 block away one) was erected in the 1980s. Actually they both may have been built in the 80s because I remember seeing one under construction when I was a kid.
Almost all the buildings in the downtown core are old, brick buildings (plaster and lath interiors) and the very tallest would not be taller than the one in my fake picture. Across the street their used to be a vaudeville theatre that was a movie theatre for awhile, a bank (the three story kind with big, fat pillars out front), and assorted shops.
It really, truly looks like that was the case when you see it. All the old buildings in the core are roughly the same height. You can see slight remains of timbers, brickwork, and roof line from the building that used to be next to it. The building next to it would have been directly south.
Most of the buildings that run along that stretch are from the same time frame, but it is possible the buildings to the north are a couple decades younger. So I would guess if the neighboring building was built first and had the ad rightway round, the one that now has the ad would have been built next to it within 20 years.
