Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Tracking ‘Privilege Signs’ as They Vanish


A privilege sign.


And you have seen them, though you probably don’t recognize them by that name. You may not even know that there is an industry term for the promotional signs installed by large corporations — usually soft-drink companies, most often Coca-Cola — on mom-and-pop storefronts.


Privilege signs once could be spotted everywhere. Now, they are few enough to be tracked like endangered species. And people do.


“I get a lot of traffic for those old signs when I put them up on the site,” said Esther Crain, the creator, producer, editor, writer and photographer of Ephemeral New York, a Web site that has tracked remaining privilege signs.


“Not to over-intellectualize it, but I think people are very charmed by them,” she said. “We’re surrounded by so much fake authenticity. You come across them and you’re, ‘Wow, that was when there was no irony behind store signs.’”


What is lost along with privilege signs is a sense of modesty and history. They speak of a time when store owners did not emphasize who they were as much as what they sold: fruits, vegetables, stationery, toys, candy and sandwiches. They are a visual link to the years of the Great Depression and World War II.


Fifteen privilege signs were recorded by James T. Murray and Karla L. Murray in “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York.” Ms. Murray said last week that more than half of all the storefronts shown in the book, published in 2009, were already gone.


“The loss of these old signs and the stores signifies a loss in the neighborhood,” she said. “They tended to be meeting places, gathering places.”


A privilege sign served the small-business owner. “He knew that it would bring people into the store,” Mr. Murray said. “He didn’t have to pay for it and it was instant brand recognition.”


Privileges ran both ways. Big businesses enjoyed the privilege of weaving their marketing campaigns right into building facades.


“It took off in the 1930s, especially advertising in small, local grocery stores and convenience stores,” said Brad Roop, a collections associate at the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, Tex.


Photographers for the Farm Security Administration and Works Progress Administration focused on the signs as they documented America. Walker Evans immortalized a tiny rural grocery store as the “Coca-Cola Shack in Alabama.”


“It’s such a piece of the fabric of American life,” said Ted Ryan, the director of heritage communications at the Coca-Cola Company. “These signs are there, captured as this piece of living history.”


Representatives from national corporations or local bottling companies offered retailers a choice of signs in a variety of styles, customized as the store owners wished. Among the most familiar were Coke’s Goldline signs, named for the rails to which individual letters could be affixed.


After World War II, privilege signs reassured an increasingly mobile public that the familiar comforts of home — a Coke, a 7-Up, a Pepsi — would be available in whatever strange city one happened to land. Even New York, where there was no surer way to find a newsdealer than to look for a privilege sign for Te-Amo or Optimo cigars.


They also transformed storefronts from hand-lettered works of idiosyncratic art into crisp, clean, stripped-down expressions of corporate uniformity.


By the 1960s, however, supermarkets and other large chain stores were supplanting corner grocers. Customers were not just buying soft drinks by the glass. They were buying them by the two-liter bottle, six-pack and case. Corporations must have concluded there were better ways to spend marketing money than on customized streetfront signs that demanded a lot of material and labor.


With the advent of computer graphics and printed vinyl, store owners also found they had a lot more latitude to create their own unique signs, without having to share their marquee with other brands. Coca-Cola, too, adopted to vinyl. But the days of letter-by-letter assemblage had passed.


Except at Eddie’s Sweet Shop, 105-29 Metropolitan Avenue, in Forest Hills, Queens. Adorning the exterior of a nearly perfectly preserved ice-cream parlor are two classic privilege signs. Building Blocks stopped by to chat with the owner, Vito Citrano. But Sean Donovan, who has been a soda jerk at Eddie’s for five years, said Mr. Citrano was down in the basement making ice cream and could not possibly be disturbed.


As this reporter sat on a stool at the marble-topped counter, drinking the richest vanilla malted milk shake since boyhood, Mr. Donovan said that when Mr. Citrano and his father, Giuseppe, took over the business in 1968, “it was already considered old-fashioned.”


“They made a decision a long time ago,” Mr. Donovan said, “that keeping it the way it was, was the way to go.”





Yahoo Local News – New York Times




http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=15804

via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info

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