Midtown Manhattan

WHAT IS IT ABOUT those barely-there painted billboards of yesteryear you occasionally spot — often, perhaps, spot if you are purposefully looking for them — clinging to the sides of old buildings like ghosts of another era?

Harlem

That’s just it, I guess, the fascination: their ability to persist through the radical changes in the built environment around them, as well as their bold size. They’re hangers-on from a day when the most exciting way to advertise soda and zippers and other then-novel products was to emblazon them fifty feet high on a brick wall.

New York City

Frank Jump is one of those who purposely looks. A blogger and author of The Fading Ads of New York City, published last November by the History Press, he is speaking tonight (Wednesday, February 15, 2012) at 7PM at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and no doubt, showing examples from his long-running photographic project documenting vintage murals on building facades, many of which have been covered up or otherwise destroyed since he captured them.

Brooklyn

Tickets are $10, $8 for BHS members. For more info, go here.

Photos: Frank Jump, 1997-8