10 November 2011

Mystery Sign on Canal Street


I stopped in the middle of the street and stared at this rusted facade on Canal Street for about 20 minutes the other day. With its new signage torn off, I thought I glimpsed the shadows of an older painted sign among the wreckage. If I only stared long enough, I thought, I would figure it out, like one of those optical puzzles in which a word is spelled out in slightly different colored dots.  


The address is 232 Canal. That was clear enough on either side of the sign. And "E A T" was visible enough, making me think for a while the space had been a restaurant of some kind. Then a perceived and "E R" later on in the letters, which gave me the idea that the word I was looking at was THEATER. But that seemed a long shot, as the building had no earmarks of a theatre. Finally, I figured it out: LEATHER. Not a business that leaps to mind in the modern mine, but a trade far more common a century ago. 



In 2008, the City shut down this address for trafficking in counterfeit merchandise. 



The address is part of a distinctive triangular shaped building that has been around since the 1800s, and now serves primarily as a place to stick a huge billboard for iPad2.



1 comment:

  1. Until as late as about 1990, just a few blocks from this sign, there were several small leather wholesalers on Spring Street between Bdwy and Lafayette, and a couple more on Bdwy near Spring, and another near Bleecker.

    One whose sign I still recall was Marap Leather, which google tells us has moved to 360 Lexington.

    So "leather" makes sense.

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