Lights Out 2018: Signs We Lost This Year

As with previous years, this year's list covers signs that disappeared within the past year and a bit prior.  The list is a little longer than usual this year - that owes to some past-due auditing of my list.  Christmas is over.  There's a lot to look at here so let's cut the crap and get to it: 

NYPD Times Square Kiosk, Midtown Manhattan / Installed c. 1982

Times Square's old NYPD kiosk was one of the very last vestiges of the old, pre-LED-signboard Times Square, so it's a real bummer to learn that the little building was totally replaced this year (and its neon all LEDed).  (Note: The Yahoo! sign in the background disappeared a while ago.)  More via the BoweryBoogie blog.

The "Network" Sign, 756 9th Avenue, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan

This sign was always a bit of a mystery, "modern" (1980s?) sign faces having been mounted over its original lettering.  The old sign faces had begun to peek out from below, prompting some of us sign enthusiasts to eagerly anticipate the day when they might emerge to reveal what this sign had been about.  Sorry to report that the whole thing is gone now.  A little internet digging suggests that the sign may have belonged to Grossman's Furniture.  See also this homage from a few years back at the ScoutingNY blog. 


North Village Wine & Liquor, 254 W14th Street, Manhattan / Installed c. 1950
This old favorite finally disappeared in 2018 as the whole southeasterly corner of 14th and 8th has now been cleared for redevelopment. 
 


Berkley Clothes, 568 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn (Photo via Forgotten-NY)
A great neon ghost that had presided over the corner of 5th Ave and 15th Street in South Slope, Brooklyn.  I went out to shoot it this autumn only to find that I came too late. 


Gramercy Cafe, 184 Third Ave., Manhattan (Photo via James and Karla Murray)
Gramercy Cafe's great little script-vs-block sign is another one that got away from me.  The old diner bit the dust a few years ago.  A new occupant gave the sign a rotten little LED make-over not long after. 


Armando's Restaurant & Bar, 143 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights
Armando's gave us all a scare when it temporarily closed a few years back.  It came back, but this year it closed for good, taking its fabulous old sign (in fact, a fabulously replicated old sign) with it.  More here by way of Patch.  


Raccuglia Funeral Home, 323 Court Street, Brooklyn 

It seems no one held a funeral for this now-vanished funerary neon, long a neighborhood fixture in Carroll Gardens.  A 2009 tribute here at the Lost City blog.  

John Smolenski Funeral Home, 1044 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Time's up for John Smolenski:  more vanished Brooklyn funeral home neon, this time in Greenpoint.   


J. Josephs Sons Appliances, 1056 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn 
J. Josephs occupied a panorama of veteran storefronts on the same block as the similarly-vanished Smolenski Funeral Home.  The signs, storefronts and the buildings that housed them have all been erased to make way for a new 7-story apartment building.  

205 East 38th Street (The Quaker House Garage?), Manhattan (LEDed) 

Manhattan parking garages were long a bastion of midcentury neon, but this is a typology careening toward extinction.  This one (and the three below) went the way of the Studebaker in the last few years, either replaced by LED signs or plowed-under along with the garages they advertised for new more lucrative real estate ventures. 

 

825 Second Ave (facing East 45th Street), Manhattan (LEDed)

330 West 38th Street, Manhattan (redeveloped)

509 West 34th Street, Manhattan (demolished) 

 

IDCNYC International Design Center (ex-Sunshine Biscuits), Long Island City, Queens

This massive Long Island City roof sign was the spiritual descendant of the enormous Sunshine Biscuits sign of the early 20th century, and the Executone Intercom sign of midcentury decades (more on these here).  Reusing the massive metal framework of the older electronic billboards, the IDC sign appeared here in the 1980s (it was, in fact, flood-lit, not neon), its lettering the handiwork of graphic designer Massimo Vignelli (of NYC Subway signage fame).  Signs and framework all disappeared in the last few years as part of a concomitant wham-bam-thankyou-ma'am recladding that has trashed the classic terra cotta facades of this great old industrial building. 

Dante Pastry Shop, 4715 White Plains Rd, and Peerless Dry Cleaners, 4706 White Plains Rd, Bronx
Two classic storefronts that faced eachother across White Plains Road in the Wakefield section of the Bronx. Both have now bit the dust.  



Maryland Furniture, 911 East Tremont Avenue, Bronx
Another Bronx classic now gone.
  

Schiller's Liquor Bar, 131 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Not an old sign, but a classic of recent years:  Schiller's closed in 2017 and its signs are now gone.  Their lovely script lettering was the work of Nancy Howell Calligraphy. 


B.B. King's, 237 West 42nd Street, Times Square, Manhattan
Another recent classic that proved too good to make it through 2018.


Seward Park Liquors, 393 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan 
Seward Park Liquors vanished last year from their longtime home on Grand Street. It has since reopened around the corner, with an LED approximation of its now-vanished neon predecessor.   

AND THE ONES TO WATCH IN 2019:


The Coffee Shop, 29 Union Square West, Manhattan
A longtime landmark of Union Square, pushed out by a rent hike late in 2018.  The signs have been here since about 1960.  They survived several incarnations of this now-shuttered eatery, but may not be here much longer as the spot is rumored to be earmarked for a bank. 


Desco Vacuum Cleaners, 131 West 14th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
In February 2018, the Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog gave us the really sucky news that 14th Street's Desco Vacuum Cleaners had shuttered. Its lovely old vertical neon sign is still hanging in there but probably not for long.  


El Quijote, 226 West 23rd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
In March, the El Quijote (in business since 1957) succumbed to ass-the backwards ownership-shuffle / gut-renovation that has had the Chelsea Hotel and most of its storefronts shuttered since 2011.  The restaurant's new owners announced that it would re-open later in 2018 but that of course never happened and the fate of the establishment and its sign remain in doubt at pencils-down.  


Loft Candies, 88 Nassau Street, Lower Manhattan / Installed c. 1960
The sad saga of this fantastic sign got quite a bit of attention at this blog in 2017, when it looked like a fabulously improbable resurrection was about to play out here.  Alas, it has thus far proved too good to be true, and what will happen with this great historic storefront remains to be seen.


Horn & Hardart Retail Shop, Dekalb Av. at Bond St., Brooklyn / Installed circa-pre-1960
Like Loft's of Nassau Street, this great ghost sign was revealed with the removal of newer signage that had kept it hidden for years.  Unlike the Loft's sign, this one was never slated for any kind of revival as the whole block is scheduled for demo to make way for another massive new building in downtown Brooklyn. 

Show World Center, 669 Eighth Ave., Midtown Manhattan
In May, we learned (also via Jeremiah) that the Show World Center, smutty stalwart of old Times Square, had finally peeped its last.  The sign remains, likely not for long, a ghost of bygone grit.  

Pearl Diner, 212 Pearl St, Lower Manhattan

Finally, in one last little turd of toilet-worthy news, we learn that the Pearl (Street) Diner - Lower Manhattan's little train that could since 1958 - has a date with the bulldozer in 2019, its site to be cleared for a new 21-story hotel.  

Neon News & Links

• From the good-news-for-once department, word that 42nd Street's monumental Hotel Tudor sign has come back alight.  



• I'm on TV!  Talkin' Neon at Let There Be Neon with Ovation TV's Kyle Supley.

(Ovation TV)

• Way out west, director Quentin Tarantino has done a serious solid for admirers of LA neon: for the production of his next film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" Tarantino has "recreated old theaters and storefronts with astonishing detail." 

(Curbed LA)

• I'm a little behind the ball on posting this one, but don't let that stop you from enjoying this graphic tribute to the late Carnegie Deli by illustrator Julia Rothman.

(Julia Rothman)

• Let there be ...  another NEW YORK NEON WALKING TOUR!  But it's already sold out, alas.  This tour is sponsored by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and is currently available for GVSHP members only.  Stay tuned for news of future tours, which will be reported at this blog.

• From the not-neon-but-still-interesting department, feast your eyes on a selection of NYC's Italian culinary signage via the Ephemeral NY blog. 

• Via the Shorpy blog, the following: 

     > Not neon and not NY but a sign so fantastic that who cares. 

     > Neon New Mexico, 1940.  

• Union Square's Coffee Shop, whose glorious vertical sign is a perennial favorite among admirers of New York neon, has joined the endangered list with the restaurant's closing announced for this October. See this coverage at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, and at Eater. 

• From the Neon-in-Art department, a lot going on: 

     > Old Town Bar and other neon landmarks of New York on canvas, by artist Borbay.

     > More fantastic neon on canvas by Mary Anne Erickson. 

     > Radio City neon in the distance in this 1936 view by John J. Soble, via Ephemeral NY. 
     > From photographers James & Karla Murray, a crazy cool display of "Mom n Pops of the Lower East Side" is on view outdoors at Seward Park . . . and indoors at the Storefront Project on Orchard Street. 

(Fractured Atlas)

• In the great southwest, Debra Jane Seltzer has undertaken maybe her most comprehensive documentary road trip yet: California to Tuscon Parts 1-30, starts here. 

• The Times pays a visit to Lite Brite Neon of Gowanus in a piece on artists and artisans. 

Hotel Neon: the Penn-Post Hotel

In the whole dark, sordid milieu of New York's gritty neon-clad hotels, one establishment stands out as a particularly dark star.  A nondescript parking lot is all that remains where once stood the Penn-Post Hotel, at the southwesterly corner of Eighth Avenue and West 31st Street in Manhattan.  Scratch just a little below the asphalt, and this unassuming corner comes alive with stories of sin and scandal that could make even Philip Marlowe himself think twice before taking the case.

The Penn-Post circa 1920 (Duke University Libraries)

I first noticed the Penn-Post in an old photo from the early 1970s, taken just before it was torn down.  Something about the place seemed worth second look.  But where to start?  The hotel's name lay partly hidden behind a M34 "Culture Loop" bus parked in the foreground.  Beyond the bus, a tantalizing glimpse of the hotel's ancient neon sign yielded only the letters "PENN P-"

(Joe Testagrose) 

I filled in the rest a few months later, on a visit to the Municipal Archives downtown.  It took just a few minutes to scan through a grainy, microfilmed copy of a 1933 City Directory pulled from a battered metal file cabinet.  "Penn-Post Hotel," it said: "Marg't L. Donohue, mgr."  Something told me ole Peggy must have been quite a gal. I decided to keep digging.

(Joe Testagrose) 

With the hotel's name in hand, the rest came easy.  Exactly when the Penn-Post first reared its head on this corner is unclear:  the building likely dates to the 1870s or so, but the name must have come after the advent of the neighboring General Post Office (now the Farley PO), opened in 1914, and of course Penn Station, opened in 1910.  The hotel turns up with an encouraging illustration in the 1920 edition of something called the "Official Hotel Red Book and Directory," advertising itself as the "Penn-Post Hotel For Men . . . A Place You'll Like!"  

"A Place You'll Like!" (Official Red Book and Directory, 1920)

Turns out the Penn-Post wasn't all that likable, unless maybe you had nowhere else to go.  A New York Times search yields a succession of headlines that read like a stack of film noir screenplays.  First comes the murder, in November 1920, of one Leeds Vaughn Waters, "globe-trotter,"  by a certain John Reidy, aged 24, deserter from the navy.  Waters, it seems, picked up Reidy on 42nd Street in the wee hours of Wednesday, November 3rd.  Reidy later told police that Waters, apparently a friendly sort, invited him to spend the night in his rooms at the nearby Hotel Plymouth.  One thing led to another and Waters wound up dead at the hands of his new friend.  The cops caught up with Reidy a few weeks later, at the Penn-Post Hotel.  

The next year, more trouble:  "Two Restaurants and Hotel Robbed," read the headline.  At around 2 a.m. on December 21st, a pair of armed assailants kicked off a minor-league crime spree at the Penn-Post, where they managed to shake down the night manager for $50 (they also made off with the room clerk's diamond tie clasp.)  "They were swarthy," said the Times of the gunmen, who remained at large the next day.

1922: another year, another stick-up, this time complete with a cops-n-robbers car chase straight out of the Untouchables.  The two gunmen had just gotten started with the night clerk when the cops, alerted by "a newsboy known only as 'Abie,'" crashed the party.  Caught off guard, the bad guys split up: one dove into a getaway car where a couple of girlfriends were waiting and took off down Eighth Avenue.  New York's finest commandeered a passing sedan and gave chase, finally catching up with the bad guys at First Avenue and 18th Street, shots exchanged all along the way.  The girls wound up in the slammer, but the gunman got away.  The other bandit meanwhile had hopped on the running board of a "north-bound touring car" headed up Eighth Avenue and, "holding his pistol at the chauffeur's head, ordered him to put on at full speed."  A police detective hailed another passing car and tailed him as far as 47th Street, but the second gunman too managed to give the law the slip.

The Penn-Post made headlines again in 1923, when one of its residents - a certain Frank Kelly - got himself shot in the neck by the men in blue after a botched robbery attempt at a pool hall on West 41st Street.  The hotel lost another lodger to the clink in 1924, when police nabbed Edward Diamond, aged 21, for holding up a jewel truck (aptly) that June.  The cops collared yet another of the Penn-Post's esteemed guests the following year, this time arresting one James Tackney for allegedly making off with $35 from the 14th Street Station of the Ninth Avenue El.  Tackney, a bit of a bad seed, had previously escaped from the Randall's Island "House of Refuge" (juvenile prison) by swimming across the East River.

1926 brought the unhappy story of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Sharkey of Scranton.  Having planned themselves a holiday weekend in the big city, the Sharkeys made an ill-advised booking at the Penn-Post.  As it happened, their visit coincided with one of the hotel's seasonal hold-ups.  Craving an early morning snack, Mr. Sharkey had gone out for "some coffee and crullers" and came back just as the night clerk was forking over the contents of the hotel's safe to three armed men.  Sharkey's bad timing cost him $495 in cash and a diamond ring reportedly worth $450.  Later that day, the couple picked up their car on 26th Street only to discover that their topcoats had been likewise pilfered:  "Mr. and Mrs. Sharkey were thoroughly robbed in their brief stay in the city," reported the Times. 

The headlines for the rest of 1926 didn't get much better:  "Slaying Laid To Feud of Drug Peddlers" in June, then "30 Crimes Fastened on Weeping Gunmen" in July (the Penn-Post figures into both stories tangentially).  Then came another armed robbery in 1927 ("3 Youths Steal Car, Hold Up Two Places"), this time unburdening the hotel of $282 ($52 from the night manager, $5 from the porter, and $225 from the safe).  "Gunmen Shot Down in a Running Fight" came the news the following April, as the Penn-Post lost another guest to the scales of justice that spring.  "Held For Robbing Friend," headlined the Penn-Post's next moment of fame: "Ricardo Diaz, 24 years old, an unemployed waiter living at the Penn-Post Hotel . . . was held on $5000 bail yesterday. . . ."   A heist of silver fox skins led to the loss of yet another tenant in 1930.  This was followed by another stick-up in July of '31, then at least three more guests claimed by the law in 1935 and 36. 

The most notorious name on the Penn-Post's illustrious guest register may have been that of Charles McGale, whom the police collared (at the Penn-Post) for a botched robbery in January 1936.  Sentenced to fifteen years at Sing Sing, McGale apparently got antsy about five years in.  He and two fellow inmates decided to make a break for it in April of 1941.  "4 Dead, 2 Captured in Sing Sing Break" read the front page of the Times on April 15th.  McGale and his cohorts made it to freedom, however briefly, but not before fatally shooting a guard while checking out.  Minutes after breaking free, one of the escaped prisoners got caught up in a mutually-fatal gunfight with a local patrolman from the Ossining PD.  (The fourth casualty was an unentangled inmate who dropped dead of a heart attack upon hearing news of the break.)  McGale and his surviving conspirator hijacked a rowboat and made it across the Hudson River to Rockland County, where they were promptly arrested and returned to Sing Sing. Both men got the chair the following June. 

Things seemed to quiet down at the Penn-Post after the 1930s.  Maybe the hotel's glory years were behind it.  Or maybe the Times had better things spill its ink on.  In any case, the litany of headlines trails off to a trickle by the 1940s.  This is not to say that the hotel turned over a new leaf.  A 1964 story made subtle reference to a little secret the Penn-Post kept down in its basement all the while:  "Policeman Demoted Over Hotel Inquiry," read the headline, a somewhat demure outline of a case in which a deputy police inspector got himself in hot water for "impeding a police investigation into alleged homosexual activities" at the hotel.

The Penn-Post didn't offer much in the way of amenities, except for a "turkish bath" in its basement.  This was open to guests and non-guests alike.  "Hotel for men," read the advertisement back in 1920, "a place you'll like!"  While a reform commission identified the Penn-Post as a house of assignation as early as early as 1923, the baths downstairs had earned a reputation as a down-low meeting place for gay men by the 1920s. 

"Beginning in the 1920s, the Penn-Post Baths, located . . . in the basement of a seedy assignation hotel on West Thirty-first Street near Eighth Avenue, offered a strikingly different sexual scene," writes historian George Chauncey in his book Gay New York.  "Like the [nearby Everard baths], it was busiest in the evening, especially after the bars closed, during lunch, and right after work, when it drew men from the many offices and depots in the neighborhood and from among the commuters who passed through Penn Station, just across the street.  But because it was so cheap, its clientele ... included poorer office and manual workers.  It had none of the privacy or elegance of the Everard, for its facilities consisted of little more than one large room, which held a dozen or so bunks and a few benches, plus a shower room and a tiny steam room, and its exhibitionistic sexual scene, as well as its 'low-class' clientele, gave it a somewhat unsavory reputation among middle-class gay men."


(Duke University Libraries)

While the Times laid this aspect of the Penn-Post story between the lines, the hotel's gay days are recounted in greater detail in the book "Alienated Affections" by Stanley Kleinberg, who frequented the basement baths beginning in the 1940s.  Kleinberg described the establishment as an "eerie Turkish bath" where he "paid a dollar to 'use the showers'" while still a minor.   "What I saw at the Penn-Post was lust in action," he wrote, "silent, genital, brief and somewhat grim. . . . there were no rooms or corners, no place for privacy and therefore no place for foreplay. I did not see two men kiss for years . . . by then, the Penn-Post was attracting younger men with its growing reputation as the raunchiest baths in town." 


A "Ten-Cent Turkish Bath" on the Bowery, c. 1900. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

The Penn-Post made its last New York Times appearance in a 1974 story on Single Room Occupancy hotels being shut down to make way for various more lucrative redevelopment schemes.  Long before New York's hyper-gentrification seemed even a remote possibility in a then crumbling Gotham, city agencies were already monitoring conditions at places like the Penn-Post on behalf of the elderly and other low income persons for whom they provided much needed de-facto affordable housing.  The Penn-Post, reported the Times, was one of at least 23 SROs that had closed in the preceding year.

The city's Department of Buildings issued a demolition permit for the old hotel in 1975, still a few years before the the AIDS crisis exploded and the health department put an end to New York's bath house culture in the 1980s.  A fenced-in parking lot now occupies the corner where the hotel once stood.  The stretch of Eighth Avenue below Penn Station remains one of the last bastions of urban grit in midtown, though it too, has begun to turn.  A few blocks down Eighth Avneue, the old Vigilant Hotel - one of the city's last Bowery-style flops - seems finally to have flipped its last flop. On the same block as the Penn-Post, the gutted shell of the old D'Aiuto bakery sits empty, while on the next corner, a new neon sign heralds the Riff Chelsea, a hip hotel with "rockstar rooms for 2-star rates."  One TripAdvisor review laments the "just-get-over-it" attitude of the hotel's staff, but concedes that its "location is perfect."

 

Eighth Avenue and West 31st Street in 2018. (T. Rinaldi)

POSTSCRIPT: The Real Deal reports that the Riff Chelsea was sold for $28 million in May 2018.  The hotel closed immediately and is being prepped for demolition at the time of posting.  

THIS IS THE NINTH in a series of stories entitled "Hotel Neon," exploring the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. See also:

• Hotel Neon, Part 8: The Hotel Allerton
• Hotel Neon, Part 7: The Arlington Hotel
• Hotel Neon, Part 6: The St. James Hotel

• Hotel Neon, Part 5: The Penn Terminal Hotel

• Hotel Neon, Part 4: The Keller Hotel

• Hotel Neon, Part 3: The Cavalier Hotel

• Hotel Neon, Part 2: Hotel Neon (Introduction)

• Hotel Neon, Part 1: The Chelsea Hotel