The Laundromat With the Butcher's Sign

I was walking down Smith Street past the Red Rose restaurant, the old red-sauce joint for forty years standing, when a photograph in the window caught my eye. I'd never seen it before. It was a black-and-photo of the eatery from the '70s. The sign and and storefront were different back then. And there was a vertical "Pizza" above the restaurant, betraying the joint's now-forgotten heritage as a pizza place.

But that's not what interested me. I noticed the business to the north of the Red Rose, Martino Bros. Prime Meat Market. Long gone, of course, but the pale, metal sign looked oddly familiar.

So I walked about ten feet down the street and took a good look at the laundromat that had taken the place of Martino Bros. The sign was big, pale yellow and metal. Could it be it was the same damn sign the butcher had used?

I looked more closely. Sure enough. The owners of Smith Laundromat has just painted over the Martino Bros' letter and painted on their own name. Only they hadn't done so fantastic a job, so you can still see the outlines of some of the Martino letters, like "S," seen above.