OK. Now I get it. I’ll look up next time I’m in the area.

Sorry for the confusion. I thought you were referring to the photo!

Glad you liked my work.

Claire

Great sculptures, by the way!

As you can see from my web site, I like doing old buildings in Montreal and some wall ads, like Union Stamp Shoes, which is no longer visible, as it is covered up, almost by a new building. It is on St. Antoine, just east of St. Lawrence Blvd.

By the way, the Shaw Building now looks like this, and is home to the Maverick Brewery. Some details of the adaptation, which was up for a design award, are here.

Evan, I’m surprised to hear that election signs are actually painted on the sides of buildings in Chicago. Here they’re just plastic posters that are attached to lampposts and removed after election day. No stickers, either.

Old political stickers never seem to die either. In my old neighborhood of Hawthorne, New Jersey, traffic-signal control boxes are covered in “FLORIO-FREE IN ‘93″ stickers, referring to a former governor who was a very polarizing figure in our usually very Democratic state. And here in Chicago, a “John Glenn for President” sign is attached to a lamppost in front of my old apartment.

One vote here.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of most restorations – this one for example has an air of inauthenticity about it, though I suppose it is preferable to a building plastered with contemporary advertising.

I remember a kickass working 19th-century pharmacy inside that very same old building in Malmo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/akkolady/228094057/

A photo: http://static.flickr.com/99/285655093_f52f94caf2_o.jpg

Sounds like the heritage group has a very narrow definition of heritage. I spoke with an architect about ghost signs and he sees no redeeming value in them, aesthetically, historically or culturally. I look at these old advertisements and I wonder what they looked like originally and what the city was like when these were all over the place. You see them in old photos all the time but of course they’re in black-and-white; imagine how colourful the streets would have been with these things on every wall. Aside from that, I’m also interested in their content: the advertising slogans are usually very quaint, the products themselves are of a different era (when was the last time you saw an ad for shoe polish or welding?).

I understand the aesthetic argument against these signs, but I don’t understand how anyone can look at them and not be the slightest bit curious about their origins.

I met some people in Quebec City who had an interesting project to protect and draw attention to these old ghost signs. They were hoping to use multimedia projections at night that would recreate the original ads, appearing, disappearing, playing with colours, highlighting the different layers, etc. I thought it was a great idea, but some people at a large local heritage organization said that advertisements were not heritage, that the painted murals all over the city are tacky and that we don’t need more crap to draw attention away from the architecture. hm…