Signs, Streets, and Storefronts
Signs, Streets, and Storefronts

Author: Martin Treu

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 142140494X

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Treu tackles the architectural history and signage of Main Street and the strip—from painted boards nailed over crude storefronts to sleek cinemas topped with neon glitz. Honorable Mention, Architecture and Urban Planning, 2012 PROSE Awards Signs, Streets, and Storefronts addresses more than 200 years of signs and place-marking along America’s commercial corridors. From small-town squares to Broadway, State Street, and Wilshire Boulevard, Martin Treu follows design developments into the present and explores issues of historic preservation. Treu considers “common” architecture and its place-defining business signs as well as influential high-style design examples by taste-making leaders. Combining advertising and architectural history, the book presents a full picture of the commercial landscape, including design adaptations made for motorists and the migration from Main Street to suburbia. The dynamic between individual businesses and the common good has a major effect on the appearance of our country's Main Streets. Several forces are at work: technological advances, design imagination and the media, corporate propaganda, customer needs, and municipal mandates. Present-day controls have often led to a denuding of traditional commercial corridors. Such reform, Treu argues, has suppressed originality and radically cleared away years of accumulated history based on the taste of a single generation. A must-read for city planners, town councils, architects, sign designers, concerned citizens, and anyone who cares about the appearance and vitality of America’s commercial streets, this heavily illustrated book is equally appealing to armchair historians, small-town enthusiasts, and lovers of Americana.

Sign Painters
Sign Painters

Author: Faythe Levine

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 2013-07-02

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 161689198X

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There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our visual landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade. In 2010 filmmakers Faythe Levine, coauthor of Handmade Nation, and Sam Macon began documenting these dedicated practitioners, their time-honored methods, and their appreciation for quality and craftsmanship. Sign Painters, the first anecdotal history of the craft, features stories and photographs of more than two dozen sign painters working in cities throughout the United States. With a foreword by legendary artist (and former sign painter) Ed Ruscha, this vibrant book profiles sign painters young and old, from the new vanguard working solo to collaborative shops such as San Francisco s New Bohemia Signs and New York s Colossal Media s Sky High Murals.

What the Signs Say
What the Signs Say

Author: Shonna Trinch

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2020-06-15

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0826522793

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Although we may not think we notice them, storefronts and their signage are meaningful, and the impact they have on people is significant. What the Signs Say argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of the place known as Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than two thousand storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, the study charts two very different types of local Brooklyn retail signage. The unique and consistent features of many words, large lettering, and repetition that make up Old School signage both mark and produce an inclusive and open place. In contrast, the linguistic elements of New School signage, such as brevity and wordplay, signal not only the arrival of gentrification, but also the remaking of Brooklyn as distinctive and exclusive. Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, a sociolinguist and an anthropologist respectively, show how the beliefs and ideas that people take as truths about language and its speakers are deployed in these different sign types. They also present in-depth ethnographic case studies that reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are intimately connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of privilege. Far from peripheral or irrelevant, shop signs say loud and clear that language displayed in public always matters.

Store Front
Store Front

Author: James T. Murray

Publisher: Gingko PressInc

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 9781584232278

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Within the pages of STORE FRONT, the reader may explore entire blocks that have not changed much in the past century, engaging in startling encounter with contemporary New York. Details of an architectural and cultural heritage that is fast disappearing such as signage, architectural adornment and window displays are presented in context, as they exist on the street, all in amazing detail.

Vintage Tampa Storefronts and Scenes
Vintage Tampa Storefronts and Scenes

Author: John V. Cinchett

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 0738591769

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In Petula Clark's 1964 smash hit "Downtown," the singer describes a place where all troubles are forgotten and all cares are left behind with the glamour of bright lights, movie shows, and flashy neon signs that light up the city streets. During the 1940s and 1950s, downtown Tampa was a shining model of the American landscape. On every street corner, customers packed their shopping bags with the best to offer from dress shops, hat shops, shoe stores, and of course those beloved department stores of a bygone era, including Kress, Woolworth's, and Grant's. Locally owned stores and shops fueled by the entrepreneurial spirit of Tampa families also dotted the streets of downtown and flourished during Tampa's postwar population expansion, offering an endless bounty of possibilities for success. These historic storefront photographs, compiled from private collections and local library archives, present a walking tour of downtown Tampa and other popular neighborhoods during a simpler time that is so well-loved and remembered.

Fire Under Ash
Fire Under Ash

Author: Saskya Jain

Publisher: Random House India

Published: 2014-09-18

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 8184006527

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When Ashwin, a wealthy Delhi boy, meets Lallan, a struggling student from Patna looking to make his fortune, their friendship, with their mutual love for the almond-eyed Mallika, seems to transcend the fault lines of class and privilege. But one night at a party, a fateful incident leads their worlds to unravel with consequences that change both their lives forever, and expose the deep turmoil inherent in the frenetic energy of the new, aspiring India. An audacious debut, Fire Under Ash marks the arrival of Indian fiction’s latest star, who takes a coruscating look at Delhi’s beauty and brutality, writing the city as we’ve never read it before.

The Knish War on Rivington Street
The Knish War on Rivington Street

Author: Joanne Oppenheim

Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company

Published: 2017-08-01

Total Pages: 35

ISBN-13: 0807541834

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2018 Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Younger Readers 2018 GANYC Apple Award Nominee—Outstanding Achievement in Fiction NYC Book Writing Benny's family owns a knishery and sells delicious round dumplings. Then the Tisch family opens a store across the street—selling square knishes—and Benny's papa worries. So he lowers his prices! But Mr. Tisch does too. As each knishery tries to outdo the other, Benny helps his papa realize there's room on Rivington Street for more than one knishery.

Kanban
Kanban

Author: Alan Scott Pate

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-05-09

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0691176477

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"Kanban, a fusion of art and commerce, refers to the traditional signs Japanese merchants displayed on the streets to advertise their presence, denote the products and services to be found inside, as well as to give individual identity and expression to the shop itself. This book will trace the history of the shop sign in Japan, explore some of the businesses and trades represented, and help the reader travel back to the world of traditional Japan, made emblematic in the fascinating world of kanban"--

Brooklyn Storefronts
Brooklyn Storefronts

Author: Paul Lacy

Publisher: WW Norton

Published: 2008-02-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780393330021

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A colorful celebration of New York’s wonderfully diverse and popular borough. What do the Bari Pork Store (King of the Sausage), the Los Doctores Tires Shop, the Great Eagle Photo Company, and the St. Jude Religious Articles shops have in common? If you were Paul Lacy, they would be among the hundreds of storefronts you photographed on bicycle trips throughout Brooklyn. Over the years Lacy has managed to capture every conceivable type of shop, decorated with spectacular and wildly varied signs and displays and representing countless ethnic groups. A more colorful array of graphics, both amateur and professional, is unimaginable. Brooklyn’s storefronts are a vibrant canvas that reflects the changing trends and distinct character of this dynamic community. You don’t have to be from Brooklyn to enjoy this book—playful while documenting a fast-changing scene, it transcends geography to speak to anyone with an interest in urban culture.