On Broadway Avenue in Buffalo;
IRC - Making Progress
More Buses - More Post-War Models!
The IRC was Buffalo’s streetcar company. The sign was probably painted in 1947 or 1948.
Before I forget … I still see many businesses display signs for Bankamericard* and Master Charge.
Before I forget … I still see many businesses display signs for Bankamericard and Master Charge.
Sorry to be late getting back to you - real life intervened. Yes, we had our own currency, and in the format you describe.
I could be obtuse and say that we actually dollarised around 1813! This is fudging it a little though. From 1788, the early colony of New South Wales had no official currency, and yes rum really was used in its place! Liquid assets, you might say. In the early nineteenth century, the colony used Spanish gold coins. The colonial government stamped a hole out of the middle of them, and the resulting doughnut-shaped coin was called a “Holey Dollar”, and the piece removed from the middle was called a “dump”. Both were restruck with colonial “New South Wales” markings. There remained, however, a shortage of currency, and many local merchants and banks produced their own as promissory notes, much like the bank note situation in Hong Kong today. These were in the pounds, shillings, and pence form you’d expect from the pro-British era. Later, the colonial governments produced official legal tender, and then Australian currency came into being after federation in 1901. The notes and coins were generally the same size, shape, and colour as their British equivalents, although the designs were different. Decimalisation came on Valentine’s Day, 1966.
OK, I thought I posted here yesterday but I guess it did not go through.
In East Lansing, Michigan there are a couple of these. Unfortunately one is no longer visible because a new building was built right next to it, and the other is almost totally faded away.
Both signs refer to Michigan State University by its former names. The sign that is no longer visible due to a building going up right next to it advertised a long gone college textbook store. It refers to “Michigan State College” which is what MSU was until sometime in the 1950s. Right next to this is a vivid old ad for Vernors Ginger Ale. The Vernors mascot is a gnome, and here he is wearing a Spartan helmet in honor of MSC/MSU’s athletic teams. Sadly neither sign can now be seen, and won’t be until the building next door is torn down.
The almost totally faded away sign advertises another defunct business, the MAC Restaurant. MAC stands/stood for Michigan Agricultural College, which was the original name of the institution now known as MSU.
I still often see the old “Color TV” signs (with all the letters in different colors!) at small “Mom and Pop” type hotels.
Blasphemer: Are you referring to Woodward Ave in Detroit? I see you mention Sinclair, and I assume you mean the brand of gasoline. IIRC, they were taken over by Arco in the early 70s, and all the stations (including in Michigan) were rebranded to Arco. Eventually Arco closed all the Michigan stations. Also at some later date, Arco was ordered by a court to “spin off” some of its stations into an independent company that brought back the Sinclair name and dinosaur logo. So far, the new Sinclair has not opened any stations in Michigan that I am aware of.
I was a young child in the early 70s, and I really liked the Sinclair logo and was kind of bummed when it disappeared from Michigan. I think it was around the same time that the Pure gas stations became Union 76 as well.
I know I composed a post to this thread the other day – must’ve been eaten by the “Technical problem with our database” dragon…
Anyhow, for years I commuted to NYC from Long Island via Long Island Rail Road and got off at the Hunterspoint station, and midway between Jamaica and Hunterspoint was an old abandoned factory with big painted company logo/ad and phone number: the Amcan Fancy Feather Corporation!
In a neighboring city (Holyoke, Massachusetts), these are all over the place. I notice them all the time, but now I can’t seem to think of exactly what products they advertise. (These are of the type that are painted onto the sides of brick buildings.) I know there’s a tobacco one, and a soda cracker one, and maybe even an old car one. I’ve always thought they were pretty cool, but at the same time wondered why no one ever painted over them or sandblasted the buildings clean years ago.
Hmm…I’ll have to take the scenic route home today and see what the advertisements are for.
In my travels, I still see some businesses with names that sound like they harken back to another era. A few examples:
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Anything named “Standard” - Standard Cleaners, Standard Furniture, Standard Machine, and so on.
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Restaurants named “[Something] Lunch”. “Standard Lunch” would be the ultimate old restaurant name.
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Seafood restaurants with “Sanitary” or “Hygenic” in their names.
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The occasional restaurant or nightclub with “Casino” in its name, even though there’s no gambling there.
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Businesses with very dated names, including words like “Streamliner” (1940s-1950s) or “Rocket” (1950s-1960s).
Buffalo still has the “Colored Musician’s Club.” Which reminds me … regarding old signs, are there still any Jim Crow-era signs around in the South? Apartheid-era signs in South Africa?
“Casino” didn’t always mean there was gambling. The building overlooking the harbor on Catalina, from the 1930’s, has always been called “the Casino”, even though it’s never been a gambling house.
Around 1925, probably. And that sign is very cool.
The “Stadtbahn” as such does not exist any more, it was incorporated into the metro system in 1989 (and the Hütteldorf station was U-Bahn long before that, I think). So it is obsolete. However, they preserve it for historical reasons.
(sorry for the hijack)
Hum, can´t think of any real contribution to this thread… except that I occasionally still see ads for a long-gone newspaper. Pretty bad ones, really. (Which may explain why it´s extinct 
)
I am 16, and I have a CB in my car. I use it, too.
[sub]My car is 27 years old.[/sub]
Yeah! Did people used to be very skeptical of seafood’s safety? Another that comes to mind is “Legal Seafood” and its variants.
You’re not being obtuse. Dollar is an old, old term and covers a variety of largish silver coins, minted by several countries or authorities over the centuries, that weighed about an ounce. I’ve seen the word ‘dollar’ used colloquially by English characters in P.G. Wodehouse stories, meaning a five-shilling piece.
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For about twenty-five years, there was a store on the old Island Highway (of Vancouver Island) that had the hand-lettered sign:
TEMPORARY CLOSED
If you go up on top of a parking deck in downtown Memphis, you can see old, faded hand-painted signs on all the taller buildings. Reading things like “Brodnax Bros.” and so on.
Not quite the same, but right around the corner from my apartment there’s an ancient grocery store, still in business, that proudly sells “BEE ILK.”
And one place that’s still in operation but appears to be caught in some kind of 1950s time-warp is Anderton’s Seafood. I love the look of that place. (Its exterior was featured in a couple of scenes in 21 Grams, if it looks familiar.)
I believe there was a fad for using the word “sanitary” in product names around the turn of the twentieth century, or maybe into the 1920s.
This was when prepackaged, even precooked, food such as breakfast cereals first became widely available, and manufacturers wanted to contrast their new ‘scientifically-prepared’ food with the grubby untidy low-class natural stuff available at the market. Makes sense that ‘sanitary’ and ‘hygienic’ made their way into restaurant names as well. And ‘standard’ as well, come to think of it.
If I could find a cite for this, I’d be quite happy.
Don’t know about ‘Legal’ though…
I used to take the train into downtown Vancouver, and as the tracks passed between the older warehouses and the current rail yards / freight docks, there were a few ads painted over the masonry for now-defunct businesses. It makes me sad that some of these are being lost to the march of progression and urban renewal, as necessary as that may be.
I just wish that if these buildings are bought up for conversion into lofts or some such thing in the Olympic building boom, that the murals are refreshed instead of destroyed. Unlikely.
At least one Pure outlet never made the switch. I was amazed to see it in a small town in Tennessee about a year ago.
I used to live in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. After Eliot Ness of “The Untouchables” fame relocated from Chicago to Cleveland, he ran for mayor in 1947. A sign advertising his candidacy is still visible in the city. The Cleveland Transit System mentioned in the linked article merged with several suburban lines in the mid-1970’s and became the Regional Transit Authority, but old “CTS Bus Stop” signs still mark some RTA picjup/dropoff points.
When I went to Cleveland’s Public Hall for a basketball tournament a few years ago, I noticed a sign that marked the “Telegraph Office”. Wonder how long it’s been since a Western Union operator wired a message from that room…
In Ann Arbor, MI there is an old Coca Cola sign that you have to go on a parking deck across the alley to see. From ground level all you can see is the word “Drink.” It is quite an old sign, with the slogan “Delicious and Refreshing” which I think was used a very long time ago. I think there was another one nearby that was visible from ground level, but got painted over. There is also an old fur shop sign that has been restored.
On George Washington higway in Smithfield RI, there is an old motel tht has been falling apart for years…it looks like the motel in “Psycho”. Attached to it, there is an old Texaco station-which hasn’t pumped any gas in years! In the window of the station is a fading, hand-letterd sign “Closed Today”-it’s been closed for about 30 years! 