Everything under the sun! Everything for everybody! Everything to wear!
Believe it or not, The Internet didn’t invent superlatives, big promises, and in-your-face advertising. No, it just ceased to make them mean anything.
We’re back with our second catch-all review of the ghost signs cleaned out of the attic. This time: house goods—department stores, clothing, furniture, hardware—you get the idea.
Blocked by a freestanding billboard for decades, the advertisement for Tom Tucker Southern-style Mint Ginger Ale may as well have been unearthed by archaeologists when it arrived out-of-the-blue a few years ago.
A person can still purchase Tom Tucker, but it won’t come in a 32-ounce green glass bottle anymore. Looking every bit the champagne of Southern-style mint ginger ales it is, the big bottle was painted directly onto a two-story brick wall of a row house along Brighton Road probably 60 or 70 years ago.
We deal in ghosts, The Orbit. Ghosts of people that lived here, sure, but ghost houses too. There was an entire ghost neighborhood in Clairton until it disappeared completely. At some point we’ll get to our collections of ghost barbers, ghost taverns, and ghost pharmacies out to the world.
Ghost signs, though—the original “ghosts”! Advertising, from a time before billboards were as ubiquitous as they are now, was created by sign painters directly on the brick walls of buildings in prominent places. We’re lucky so many of them survive and—for the companies that persist, at least—one has to believe it was a solid investment to pay for one wall in 1960 and still have it working for them today.
We’ve got so many ghost sign photos in the backlog that we’re going to break up the collection into some themes. This week: food & drink edition. We’ll get to the other stuff soon.
Notes:
[1] Cox Distributing still sells cold beer from this location, but the style of sign painting and subsequent meter placement suggest this may be from an older business.
[2] While this Clark Bar ghost sign looks like some holy grail of the genre, Orbit readers informed us it was created for the film Fences which filmed in the Hill District in 2016.
[3] No, you can’t read the name DeMiller’s in this sign, but somehow astute Orbit reader Maggie Ess identified the building as home to the Keystone Potato Chip Co., 6635 Kelly Street, maker of DeMiller’s chips.
[4] Kuhn’s Quality Foods is still very much a going concern with eight stores in the region, but this brick building on Perrysville Ave. no longer hosts one of them.
[5] Reposted from our earlier story Looking for a Lost Little Italy in Larimer.
[6] Macaroni Etc! This W. Boehm Co. “Manufacturers of Mother’s and Excelsior egg noodles, macaroni, and spaghetti” ghost sign twofer was exposed only when a pair of row houses were demolished on Pearl Street in 2021.
Your author won’t pretend to know what Wu-Shuryu-Do—The Flowing Way is, but it sure sounds cool. That said, a picture is worth a thousand words and what we don’t know by name, we sure get with the accompanying artwork.
The scene: two buff fighters are flexing and straining in combat. On the right is a warrior dressed like so many kung fu movie villains—shirtless, but with arm braces, wearing tight black trousers with the legs wrapped in some type of binding fabric. A thick red sash is worn about the waist with the end dangling for jaunty effect.
His foe is literally flying through the air with a leg extended in a kick that could surely split stone. This one didn’t skimp on the wardrobe on the way to the fight, though. He’s in a Tom Jones-style combat singlet accented with a necklace of oversized beads or baubles. A decorative toque literally tops the outfit in a style that would look equally smart on the ski slopes or the runway.
And can we say, what a location for mano a mano! We hope these guys can pause for a minute between bone-crackings to take in the view. Right behind their sweaty hindsides lies a breathtaking waterfall pooling into a misty river running between rocky peaks and twisting trees. If you’re looking for an Instaworthy place to have your neck snapped, The Flowing Way has got the place.
Not all martial academies (are these dojos?) are as invested in the arts as Wu-Shuryu-Do. The Mt. Washington storefront studio has extended the custom window art to other panes of its Southern Ave. location.
Enough of them are, though, that original art decorating—and dramatizing—karate schools and Tang Soo Do meeting spots is a legitimate thing. Sure, it’s a little bit frightening and you’ve going to need expert timing, but we hope the trend continues as long as the river flows and the grasshopper learns from the cobra.
On an otherwise unremarkable side street, a single roadside tree stands out from the rest. Attached to it is a bouquet of pink and white flowers, a solar-powered light, and enlarged color photograph of a young man. The subject is both movie star handsome and ruggedly everyman in his plain white t-shirt and stretchy track suit pants. Aside from the man’s face, every square inch of exposed skin has been tattoo’d in an array of text, glyphs, and images.
Of course we can’t know for sure—there is no annotation for the beribboned photo on this back-alley tree—but by now, we’re accustomed to think of these informal tributes as memorials for lost friends, loved-ones, or community members who’ve passed onto the infinite entirely too soon for those who mourn them here on earth.
Memorial Day. Let’s do this. In what has become an Orbit tradition, we take a hyper-local turn on today’s holiday. No, it’s not strictly about honoring our fallen members our armed services, but it’s also not about discount mattresses and blow-out doorbuster deals at the mall.
These impromptu tributes—painted on walls and staked into roadside berms, placed in windows and stuck into tree trunks—are the people’s memorials. They’re what we’ll be thinking about this day—yes, along with slaw dogs, Clancy’s chips, and beer from a can—as we memorialize the memorials that are inevitably not long for this world.
Happy Memorial Day, y’all.
Man, I hope you came ready to eat.
It’s been a been more than a year since The Orbit served up its last over-the-top feast of all things skyline-shaped, themed, printed, and painted, so you have a right to be hungry.
And O! What a meal we’ve prepared for the skyline-starved today! Murals with downtown Pittsburgh as both star and supporting player. Business signage to either boast one’s 412 bona fides or pander to us yokels from a corporate office far, far away. Hand-created tributes as extracurricular activity spray painted onto bicycle paths and inked onto city steps railings.
All that—and more—awaits diners at this all-u-can-eat buffet of bridges, The Point, Steel Tower, PPG, and the rest. Grab a fork and knife, don’t waste your time on rolls—those are for suckers—and dig into a legitimate, if figurative, smorgasbord of Your Favorite City™ put on the pedestal it deserves … or, at least, thinks it deserves when it’s not too down on itself.
If somehow you’re still hungry for more, you can always go back to skyline stories one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine part 1 and 2, you know, just to tide you over.
A blast of color. Soft pinks, big reds, cool blues and purples on one face; rusty reds, browns, and blacks another. Everything is accented in gold.
That gold! It’s a gold of ancient secrets and the gold of a new dawn. The warm glow has an extra glossy shine that elevates already-textured steel surfaces to a fourth dimension—something beyond space and time. What the amateur sees as mere spray paint is actually a fuzzy overlay on reality from another world.
Cast against the very literal rust of a pair of weathered steel sheds, the gold feels like flashes of light glinting and gleaming through stony creek water. Precious metal to some, fool’s gold to others, but with an experiential value beyond anything we can measure. That is, if you can climb out of 3-D and into this transformative plane.
In glorious full sunshine, surrounded by high summer’s lush greenery, the two old metal work sheds pop from the earth like temporary housing created by interstellar travelers. We may not speak their tongue, but these pictorial representations of stars and symbols, geometric patterns and light rays communicate enough otherworldly visions that we can get along.
Getting along is exactly what we want to do—very much so. The work is striking and soothing, both chaotic and patterned, with obvious iconography and wild abstraction. Like waves crashing on the beach or mountaintops viewed from a neighboring peak, one may stare into the wide murals, let the eyes go into a glazed soft-focus, and drift off to a blissed-out zen state where nothing looks the same way twice.
The artist who painted the sheet metal sheds has signed the work only as Coker, his last name—this much we know. We’d love to do a full-on Orbit artist profile on the man—there are so many questions! Does he also make smaller works? paintings? sculptures? what’s inside the sheds? It feels like there simply must be an amazing story there.
But … the volume of No Trespassing and Stay Out signs posted around the property suggest Coker is, at minimum, wary of uninvited guests and this we respect. I’ve visited the buildings a half dozen times over the course of a year-and-a-half, on various early mornings, mid-days, and weekends and left notes for Mr. Coker. Alas, I’ve never heard back and never managed to catch him in person. So … we’re left to muse about The Wizard of Perry South from his (street-visible) painted walls alone.
Coker’s most profound work—to these highly-opinionated eyeballs—remains the large abstract wall sections. “They’re like (Marc) Chagall!” Ms. Orbit exclaimed when your author produced his first photographs of the remarkable structures. That said, the artist’s paint work extends to more representational fare as well.
A corner wall section of the first shed includes tributes to Barrack Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, George Benson, and Snoop Dogg (in the form of gin & juice, illustrated with musical notes). Another celebrates the music of ’70s soul group Maze and includes the band’s bizarre seven-fingered hand logo. Elsewhere King Kong tramples New York while a bloated “fake news scum-bag”—not sure who that could be—tramples democracy.
Just down the block sits the third unmistakable Coker property. It’s a classic Pittsburgh two-up/two-down brick row house—now having outlived all former neighbors on a half-block-long dead end. The front of the home is painted in Coker’s tell-tale gold, daringly paired with splotchy silver—a color combination that makes even pink & brown stand up and take notice. Around the side, Coker has continued the blocky, abstract themes begun on the pair of sheds, but this time executed in gold, black, and white.
We could all use more magic in our lives—of this I’m sure. Luckily, we live in a time and place where one may stumble upon just that, right out in the open, on a simple summer bicycle ride or autumnal constitutional through a city neighborhood.
If you’re lucky enough to live in The Perrys, you know where Compound Coker is already. For anyone who doesn’t, we’ll not spoil the surprise with a precise address or instructions for travel. There’s enough information right here to locate Pittsburgh’s buried treasure of gold (art), it’s up to you to go out and find it.
The Tasmanian Devil—all sinister fangs, seething anger, and whirling destruction—seems an odd candidate for the kind of precision work required for automotive repair. But there he is—crazy eyes, giant jaw agape, and squeezed tube of toothpaste body—clutching a box socket in one hand and a crescent wrench in the other on the brick wall of TNT Monster Mechanic in Beaver Falls.
Taz, as the popular Looney Tunes character is sometimes known, has a well-documented following that way outreaches the limited run of his original short cartoons. He’s a famously popular pop icon who exists in a sweet spot between lovable cartoon character and hyper-masculine bad boy who acts first and thinks … never. The podcast Decoder Ring did a terrific episode on tattoos that talked about Taz’ stranglehold on the upper arms of young men. Some of those biceps work on cars.
Auto repair shops are, almost always, structures of pure utilitarian economy. Typically constructed of brick or cinder block and lit by big fluorescent shop lights, they often contain no windows aside from what comes through the office door, garage openings, and the occasional glass block. This leaves a lot of exterior wall space available for decoration.
Most garages are as down-to-basics on the street-facing walls as the buildings that house them are plain … but not all of them. There is a particular phenomenon where mechanics have set down the wrench and picked up the paintbrush (or found others to do so) to elaborately advertise their businesses in ways both humorous and boastful, triumphant and goofy. These murals, 3-D painted cut-outs, and custom airbrush jobs all make up The Art of the Wheel.
Auto Repair artwork is a gift that just keeps giving. There seem to be piston-packing Picassos and revved-up Rembrandts just about everywhere people drive cars. If you’ve got a favorite we didn’t get to (this time), give us a holler and we’ll bag it for the inevitable sequel.
Until then, keep your foot on the gas and your eyes on the garage walls.
* The artwork for Henry’s feels like a clear homage to the over-the-top cartoon hot rod artwork of Ed “Big Daddy” “Rat Fink” Roth … but maybe it’s just coincidence.
** Yes, the mural for Auto Works, featuring the body of a 1960s Ford Mustang, does not include the chassis.
Tall towers thrust skyward into a night sky lit up in aurora borealis-like technicolor fantasia. The buildings, black in darkness but each lit from hundreds of glowing window insets, cant in wild directions with the hyperextended angularity of so much German expressionism.
The painting covers a full exterior wall on a little building on Gist Street, Uptown. Whether or not it’s supposed to represent downtown Pittsburgh is questionable, but with the spiky spires of PPG Tower clear in the foreground the mural must at least be inspired by its host city.
Like tribbles, vape shops, and yes, Omicron cases, art and design representations of downtown Pittsburgh’s skyline seem to mutate and regenerate at an exponential rate. Why this, our ninth story on the subject, had so many new skylines collected in just the last few months that we’re breaking the recent arrivals into two parts.
This then is Part 1: Let’s talk about murals where we get down with original artistic creations painted directly to brick, cinderblock, and plaster (plus one “outside art” painting). Next week, we’ll be back with Part 2: Designs, Signs, and Outlines.
Until then, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the skyline.
In the wild hillside that runs between Bigelow Blvd. and The Middle Hill, there is an oasis of street art (err … steps art? tree art?) clustered in the forgotten land around one particular set of city steps. There are sculptures and collages, weird art photos and paintings on wood. Our favorite tin can pole artist has a whole trove of terrific pieces here.
Maybe we’ll do a story on the whole thing at some point, but it was one particular piece, nailed to a utility pole, that caught the attention on this day. In it, the artist has taken a discarded piece of sheet metal and painted a rough but unmistakable black silhouette of the downtown Pittsburgh skyline. There are the spiky towers of PPG and the peaked triangles of The Gulf Tower and Koppers Building. The artwork is inscribed with the simple throwback message City of Champions.
Mere minutes–OK, it was probably a couple hours–after posting our last trip down skyline way, there it was again. The artist who hand-painted the storefront for the old Yinzers in the Burgh didn’t have a lot of vertical room to work with, but made the most of what s/he did have. In city official black-and-gold–but squashed as if in the footpath on one of Godzilla’s benders–the downtown Pittsburgh skyline is still undeniable.
So, here you go, Pittsburgh: another couple dozen+ graphic renderings of the downtown skyline coming from storefronts and retail signage, community groups and folk art. Like that famous body part/Van Patten, eight of these collections should be more than enough, but this is a gift that just keeps on giving. I’m sure we’ll be back with #9 in the series soon enough.
Pittsburgh Orbit 