pennsylvania Archives - Page 5 of 6

Flats Fixed

Last year, in my never-ending quest to find new ways of getting to the same old places, I happened through Jonestown, Pennsylvania on PA 72. I saw something interesting out of the corner of my eye on the side of the building and so I pulled over and investigated. When I did, I got some of my favorite shots, at an old building that used to be a service station. Uniroyal

flats-fixed-closeup

I turned the corner, and there was more. Much, much more. Had the sun held up, I might have stayed hours, catching every little detail: flats-fixed vulcanizing

I wish there were a happy ending to this story, but there really isn’t. Last week I went by the same location, hoping to get a few more shots, but they were in the process of tearing the building down:

gas-station-demolish

A sad end, but perhaps the old place was beyond repair. Still, I’m so glad I stopped by that day last summer. For more signs and locations that I managed to get to in the nick of time, visit my Vanishing America page.

Nick’s Diner

One of the most interesting aspects of what I do here is the reactions I get. I’ll be covering this in greater detail in some future posts, but I just wanted to say how happy I was to receive word from the owner of one local business who appreciated a contribution I made to Instagram. One of my favorite signs belongs to Nick’s Diner on Tilghman Street in Allentown, so much my favorite that I think I’ve posted four shots of this sign alone. Giannis Nikoladis, whose family owns Nick’s, recently commented on a ghostly black and white I took: “Very nice picture…You did a beautiful job and thanks again for the picture”.

It’s the first time I’ve gotten a thank you from a business owner. When I got that a couple weeks ago, I was just over the moon. Thanks so much, Giannis, and here’s one of the first pictures I took at Nick’s in the summer of 2009, at “neon magic hour.”

I’ve also gotten together some diner shots and explain my love-hate relationship with diners in general on my newly-created diner page. And if you know of any good ones I’m leaving out, please let me know!

Sign Picking in Adamstown

Adamstown, PA is known as the Antique Capital of Pennsylvania, boasting such massive outlets as Shupp’s Grove, Renninger’s, Green Dragon, The Mad Hatter, and a number of others to warm the heart of any seeker of vintage stuff out there. It had been a while since I had been down there, and my memory was fuzzy as to the selection of vintage signs I might troll through. My guess was none at all.

I was wrong…

It may seem strange to you, but I am not a fan of Lancaster County. There are a number of reasons why, but let’s just start with the elephant in the room, shall we? Lancaster County has been relatively disappointing in the sign department. Lancaster proper has squat. I’ve literally found nothing within the contents of that great city to make me want to slow my car down, much less stop and snap off a few shots.

Perhaps what soured me to Lancaster was this: I once drove out to the far reaches of Gap, PA to a place called the Bullfrog Inn. I did my research and saw several instances of their sign, which had a freaking neon bullfrog on it. I was salivating. Little did I know that before I could get there, the owners pulled it and replaced it with a red box sign with plain white lettering, and no hint of a bullfrog on it at all. I said words of languages strange and foreign, shook the dust off my feet, and continued on.

I will also talk of a beautiful neon sign along PA 272 that I missed out on a few years ago because I didn’t have my camera with me. The Pennsylvania Dutch Motel in Denver. It had a PA Dutch motif, which is rare in neon, and it was gorgeous. Removed. Thanks, guys. To see this sign, check out Ron Saari’s shot of this.

So with that in mind, I have my camera stored in the back and my wife and I are driving down 272, having sampled Shupp’s Grove. It’s a bit early in the season and it was relatively quiet, so we had moved on. We went to Renninger’s next, which is a fascinating building that makes you feel like you’re tunneling through catacombs of collectibles. I bought a Dizzy Gillespie record for a decent price. On our way out of there, we see the Penn Amish Motel off to our right. Not a bad sign, but generally plain. I glanced back and I thought I saw something, up above the motel, but at this point we’ve already gone past. I make a mental note.

“Oh, look,” my wife says. This is nearly always a good thing. She’s been my faithful spotter for a few years now, and among others, she found The Blue Comet Diner in Hazleton for me, which makes me love her all the more.

I see what she means. We’re passing the Pennsylvania Dutch Motel. The sign out front, the one that replaced the beautiful neon PA Dutch classic, is plastic, black and white, small, easy to miss, and most likely attracts approximately zero customers per year, but above, where the motel is, there’s a set of poles and what looks like the back of a sign. My eyes get wide, and a voice in my head whispers They didn’t get rid of all the neon. It doesn’t seem to be pointing at anything in particular: it’s just facing a collection of trees.

It’s like we’re whale-watching and we just saw a fin flop out of the water. My heart pounds. First chance to turn left and I take it. It was the turn-off for the Pepperidge Farm factory store, and it was quiet that afternoon. I roll along slowly, watching the tree line for some glimpse of something, anything, and then it appears, magically. Penna Dutch Motel, it reads, rusty and disused.

I mention something about clambering through the weeds and brush and she mentions poison ivy and the discussion dies down. Only one option: go up to the motel itself. Probably good policy, I think. I feel like I’ve been borderline trespassing at some of these locations, so it’s best to let people know who I am and what I’m doing. I drive up to the office and walk in. The proprietor steps out of the shadows. He’s an Indian gentleman, fifty-plus I’m guessing, and he looks a little puzzled that someone might be coming to check in at 2 in the afternoon on a Sunday.

“I’m a photographer, and I take pictures of old signs,” I say to him, and I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t rehearsed it in my mind before I walked in. “I noticed the one out back and I was wondering if you’d mind me taking a few shots.”

He squints. He certainly knows what I said, but the concept of it is hazy. I can tell he’s wondering why anyone would want to take a picture of a nasty, rusty old sign. But he agrees, and off I go into the abyss. And here’s why I would want to take a picture of it:

Whereas honor is not completely satisfied, this will have to do.

So I’m feeling lucky. We get back in the car and head back to the Penn Amish. As I head up the driveway, I can see that my glimpse had paid off. Again I go into the office and again the proprietor comes out, this one female, and I’m not trying to make a point by saying this, but it was a fact: she happens to be Indian as well. I lay the cards on the table and she seems considerably more delighted by the prospect. Their neon sign, painted red, sits behind and to the side of the motel proper, and I snap off these:

All in all, this would be a good day, but we topped it off by going to a place that I’ve never been to because I always seem to show up in the off-season. Boehringer’s Ice Cream sits along 272 and has since 1938, and at 3 in the afternoon they were positively packed. I’m reasonably certain they’ve had their sign restored, too. Ice cream, vintage sign, been around since 1938, packed with people. If I didn’t stop, you would have had to check my pulse.

I felt lucky and started messing with the in-camera effects in my Pentax K-5…

We have a thick shake each. I chose Amaretto Almond and she chose her usual Coffee, and as we drove back home, we made yummy sounds for a full fifteen minutes, frightened by the prospect of how large we would make ourselves if we lived closer.

A good day. A good day.

Ghosts of Harrisburg

There are many things that make a great photograph. Composition, lighting, and my personal favorite from Ansel Adams: where to stand. Contrast is another factor, and by that I don’t necessarily mean something you can control in Photoshop. I recall watching a retrospective on Monty Python and hearing Terry Jones say something very interesting on the nature of comedy, how he harkened back to what Browning said that a contrast of ideas in poetry yielded a star, and in that same way, their contrasting ideas brought out a laugh. That’s always stayed with me, and I find it applicable in all sorts of ways.

Exhibit A:

I love ghost signs, and sometime soon I’ll create a page specifically dedicated to them. They are the ultimate endangered signs, fading slowly out of existence, and whereas they might still be around in ten years, some clumsy oaf might come along and paint the darn thing, or worse, tear the building down. Which has been known to happen. Anyway.
This shot is good and I was happy with it. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that this brick building is out in Lancaster County somewhere, nestled in between expansive fields, the nearest farmhouse just visible on the horizon. Perhaps not even in an area that idyllic and rural, perhaps in a proud old Pennsylvania town next to a feed mill.

Surprise! This place is smack dab in the middle of the Harrisburg metro area, right by the train tracks and Interstate 83. A few weeks ago I spotted this one sitting in the middle of the city and wondered if it had been dropped here by a passing tornado.

BONUS on this trip:

I continued down the street to New Cumberland that morning because I had been foraging cinematreasures.org for movie theater marquees and found this one was in my wheelhouse for that morning.

This is the West Shore Theater, built in 1940, a true one-screen theater. Unlike most of its kind, this one looks seems to be prosperous. How could you not want to stop in and catch Silver Linings Playbook when you see “West Shore” in grand letters above it?

On the Ritz

I failed to mention something when I was talking about the trip I made to Montoursville a few weeks ago: one of my main reasons for going out in that direction was to see The Ritz Theater, a 1923 one-screener located in Muncy, PA. I stumbled upon it in my research about a month ago, and was amazed that I hadn’t heard of it before! Their website revealed that, like most theaters of its kind, it is in danger of closing.

ritz-2
I got there at 6:30 and the sun was due to go down at 7, so I waited patiently for the darkness to fall on Muncy. It was quiet, and I figured they probably wouldn’t light it up on a weekday, so I snapped off a few shots in the meantime. The shot above was an easy one to get, but I wanted to get the other side. A little difficult because the marquee kept getting in the way. I rattled off a few, but the “Z” kept getting obscured.

In case you didn’t know, I’m part goat. If you see some nut standing on something while taking a picture, that will be me. I have a stool in my trunk for just such a purpose, but my car was across the road. There’s an old trash can just down the way from the theater, one of those old fortified-with-concrete guys, in the perfect position. Up I went. ritz-on-a-trash-can

Oh, he may be crazy…but he gets results…

Well, the upshot of it is, the lights never turned on. I guess I can hardly blame them if they’re having trouble. If you get a chance, help support this theater, because goodness knows there aren’t enough of these local gems around anymore.

I’ve put together a grouping of my favorite movie theaters here.

The Danger of the Everyday

For four years I lived on Lookout Mountain, just south of Chattanooga. All throughout the South, there are (or used to be) signs and barns and birdhouses with “See Rock City” painted on it, and I lived within easy walking distance of that fine tourist attraction. Despite that fact, I never visited it. Not once. I walked over to it one afternoon when I was fighting boredom, but it occurred to me that I would be paying some exorbitant fee for a view that I pretty much saw every day.

I have no pictures of that spot.

And why? Because I felt like I didn’t have to. The view was always there.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when we were tooling around Reading with our friends Denise and Lynn: we’re on our way to the Pagoda, driving along old 422 up to Mount Penn, when off to the side of the road, I spot Effie’s Charcoal Chef, an old beaut of a place that’s been around since 1952. I kindly ask Lynn to pull off before my heart bursts out of my chest.

I got out and snapped off a bunch and got back in the car. When I do, Lynn says something to the effect that he’s passed by here a ton of times and never thought about it one way or the other. It surprised me until I thought about it: Lynn’s lived in the area his entire life. This place is a part of the scenery, someplace you pass by to get to somewhere else. The idea that I would want to take a picture of this sign didn’t even cross his mind.

The fact is, we’re all guilty of it. This last week, I missed out on a bowling sign that used to be on route 100 on the way out of Emmaus. I had always dismissed it because the top of the sign was all nasty and modern and plastic, but the rest of it was half-rusted with arrows and neon bowling pins and everything I could ask for in a classic sign. I passed by on Thursday and it was gone, another painful reminder of how quickly these lovely old relics are going by the wayside.

The moments pass quickly. Seize them.

Some more shots from Reading:

Arthur Bloom and Son Furniture on Penn Street in Reading. I spotted this in Seth Gaines’ excellent Flickr feed; his shot was from 2008, and I didn’t have high hopes that the sign would still be standing there after eight years, but there it was, even though the business was long gone. Couldn’t have been more pleased, although the sun was against me, and a tree blocked the sunny side of the sign from the best shot possible. Still, I’m pretty happy with this one.

Victor’s Cafe in West Lawn. I shared this one on Instagram and got a great response. This sign is pretty small, but the beauty of it is you can walk right up to it and get magnificent close-ups, as you can see below.

Stoudt’s Auto Sales in Reading. It seems funny to mention this, but the reason I know about this sign is the local weather channel in Allentown. Periodically, in between giving faulty weather and traffic reports, they will show outdoor shots of various locations: on top of the PPL building, on top of the Eastonian condominiums, etc. The shot in Reading is along the Warren Street bypass, and in the shot is this sign. I think they’ve restored it recently.

While I was there, I noticed a couple of 60s Corvettes on the lot, which I couldn’t resist. And after I had snapped my fill and went back to the car, what did I see but a tricked-out old Chevy coming down the road.

They came to look at the Corvettes. I can’t say as I blame them, but at the same time, if I had this bad boy in my garage, I don’t know if I would need anything else!

Looking for History

Still in Reading last Sunday. Lynn and Denise had driven us all over the city, and we had come to rest on Penn Street, the main drag of Center City Reading. We rounded a corner and I spotted this one right away: crumbling neon and gray, probably 50s or earlier. Lynn pulls the car over and we get out. It’s high up on the building and I half wonder if anyone notices it anymore. Zipf’s Candies, it says. The sun is hitting it square from the west at this time of day, so I wander over to the other side.

My mouth falls open. From the angle that I’m standing underneath the Zipf’s sign, I can see a ghost sign behind it.

Ghost signs, for the un-initiated, are the advertisements that were painted on brick that have (chances are) faded to the point that sometimes you can’t read them. They’re rare and good finds, but you hardly see them so close to another sign that you can get both in the same shot. So I couldn’t hit the shutter button fast enough:

The ghost sign says “Paper” and there’s some more of it visible if you step back a few feet.

When we got back to Denise and Lynn’s house, we started going through a set of books Lynn has that covers the history of Reading, mostly through old pictures. There are plenty of shots of Penn Street, so surely there would be one of this sign, wouldn’t there? We go through book after book. Plenty of shots of Penn Street, great shots of the Loew’s Theatre, many signs I wish were still around, but no Zipf’s. And here’s why: whoever took these shots (I’m guessing) worked in a building on the side of the street Zipf’s sits on, because each shot was taken from the same location.

I have no idea how old this sign is. Interestingly enough, some internet research has shown me that there is a Zipf’s Candies still operating in Philadelphia. They’ve been going since 1968, according to their website. No mention of Reading. And this sign looks older than ’68 to me. Anybody out there have any information?

Another Humdinger

Back to my Reading trip momentarily, but first…

Last year I made a trip to Williamsport which yielded a few good ones: the Plankenhorn, the Old Corner, Helmrich’s and a few others. I decided to leave by way of South Williamsport and in so doing stopped past the Humdinger. Jones’ Humdinger, as I showed in a previous post, was my hometown ice cream fixture, so when I mentioned that, Sue Nicholls, an artist who lives in Tennessee but was from Williamsport, asked me if I had gotten this one.

So here it is, Sue!
Humdinger-williamsport
By the way, you can see Sue Nicholls’ artwork at www.fivecentride.com

A Sunday in Reading

Sometimes it’s planning. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Picture two people tooling about in a Hyundai on a Saturday in early spring along New Jersey 29, skirting along the Delaware, escaping the city for a brief and wonderful moment. That should be enough for anybody, really, but stupid me, I have this idea that I might find a sign or two to capture along the way.

Wrong-o.

Oh, we did spot a decent 50s number on the other side of the road that made us go back and forth trying to decide if it was really a good old one or a facsimile, but other than that, not a sausage. No lovely old diners. No old motels. Bupkes.Really, New Jersey? Really?

So even though we had a nice day, I couldn’t help feeling like it was a bit of a washout.

Late in the afternoon we get a call from our friends in Reading, Denise and Lynn. They just had their pastor and their family over to their house, and had grossly over-estimated the amount of food they needed to prepare, so would we mind coming over tomorrow. Lynn was aware of my affliction, and that, for some strange reason, even though we lived only a handful of miles away from that very city for three whole years, I had failed to explore Reading for old signs. We heartily agreed.

pagoda pagoda-below

First off, no trip to Reading is complete without visiting the Pagoda. Reading, sad to say, has very few reasons to visit, but this is a biggie. It was built in 1908 by a man named William Witman who had an eye toward creating a resort on top of Mount Penn. There’s even a temple bell on the top floor. Unfortunately, he failed to get a liquor license, fell on hard times, and had to sell the Pagoda to the city of Reading for the lofty sum of $1. More about it here…

“It’s a shame,” my wife said, as we walked out the front door. “What this could have been if he didn’t sell it to the city.”

“Not to be contrary and put down private enterprise,” I replied, “but chances are, if he had continued on with his plans, this place would probably be a distant memory, one of those things you only see in old postcards.”

But on to the signs. In all, we found seven of them.

The first one I knew about. We used to pass by Schell’s, a 50s era restaurant, when we lived in the area. My sign fever had not yet reached its boiling point, but I remembered it well, and hoped that it was still there. Before we got to Denise and Lynn’s, I had passed through on old US 222 to see if Schell’s still had their sign.

Yep, not only there, but in great shape. Not only that, but I had forgotten about their ice cream shop next door, and the Schell’s sign on top of the restaurant.

But this was just the tip of the iceberg. There were plenty more signs to be had that afternoon, including one that I had never seen in any research on signs that I had ever done, none of us knew anything about, but it maybe my new favorite!

So planning helps, but improvisation can be your best friend. More from Reading to come…

Road Trip

Last week at about this time I was walking out of Target, looking up at the sky, thinking this would be a good night to get some magic hour shots.

Earlier on, I had done some research and stumbled on to a sign shot someone had taken of Rosencrans’ Bakery on Broad Street in Montoursville. I had somehow skipped over Montoursville during my sign-finding tour I had made through the Williamsport area, and about all I knew about the place was that former Orioles and Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina was from there, but when I saw Rosencrans, it immediately found its way on to my “must” list. Their sign is straight out of 1956: a color turquoise I’m convinced they don’t make anymore, red puffy letters spelling out ‘Rosencrans’, and yellow diamonds spelling out ‘Bakery’.

Oh, yeah. Come to Papa.

Not only that, but just down Broad Street was another likely candidate: the Cellini Sub Shop. Probably just as old, with a sign that has a fun bulb-y arrow. Topping all that, both places get rave reviews for the food. I’ve been bad about eating at the places I get sign pictures. It was about time I gave back.

So back to Target. Standing there looking at the sky. 6:00. Montoursville is 30 miles away. I hesitated for about a second and a half, shrugged my shoulders and got in the car.

Unfortunately, it was closed. But they had me at Sticky Buns.

Oh, did I mention the plump cartoon baker? Yeah, that’s how awesome this sign is.

On to Cellini’s. Since I’m still in pursuit of the perfect Meatball Sub, I figured I would put them to the test. (So far, my winner and still champion is Pancho’s Pit in Johnson City, NY, in case you were wondering. Maybe it’s my hometown bias). I snap off a few shots and wander in with my K5 hanging around my neck.

I’ve come to grips with the fact that when you have a camera someplace you shouldn’t, you are immediately the center of attention. Just walk into a room of schoolkids with a big old Panasonic video camera and you’ll see what I mean. People are usually curious why I’m taking a picture of a sign. I walk in and order. The girl behind the counter doesn’t say a word about the camera. Didn’t even glance. Caught me off guard a little bit. Just toddled off and put in my order. So I’m standing alone in the place. So I snap off another few shots inside.

She comes back in with my meatball sub, which by the way, was one of the best I’ve ever had. But still, the camera and why I have it never gets mentioned.

This bugs me somehow.