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.
One would think … well, this one would think a lot of things that don’t turn out to be anywhere close to reality. One would think we would have run out of babies by now—no one knows where they come from! And you’d think every square inch of human flesh would be tattoo’d by now, what with the prevalence of retail storefronts that administer ink.
As much as we’d like to ask the hard questions around chicken fingers and vaping, political candidates and exactly who thinks Fred Armisen needs to keep appearing on television screens, this post is about that most evergreen of Orbit topics—how, despite what one might think, we never run out of new renditions of the Pittsburgh skyline. They’re littered throughout the metro area with a frequency so dense most take them for granted. But what about the vigilant eyes of the Orbit? Don’t worry—we’re still looking out for you.
Here then is our latest collection—the eleventh in this series—of murals and store signage, handmade and professionally executed, all featuring downtown Pittsburgh’s familiar peaks: PPG Place, the Highmark Hypodermic, USX tower and the rest.
Until next year—and it will probably be pretty much exactly a year from now—keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the skyline.
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.
If you’re like most, you can’t even remember when or where the fever set in. A trip to the department store with Mom, perhaps—that’s where I caught it—or glanced from the corner of the eye while hustling down a busy sidewalk past downtown shop windows.
Figures, stiff and lifeless with contorted expressions and abstracted features frozen mid-pose, draped in seasonal attire or modeling hats and jewelry. Not people, but also not not people, mannequins are no simple clothes hangers in 3-D. Mannequins lead strange existences like harmless exhibitionist vampires—caught in an eternal state somewhere between alive and dead, real and imagined, naked and clothed, a waking dream and a living nightmare.
One can be excused for thinking mannequin fever only expresses itself within the world of retail apparel. I’m not going to lie, when your author is jonesing and it’s been a while he’ll take a stroll into a Marshall’s, Gabe’s, or Target’s just to take the edge off. It’s a good idea to have one’s local vintage shops in poking distance during a fallow period.
Sure, that’ll get you through, but the real fever kicks in when you’re well out-of-range of sterile department store fluorescent lights and the ringing of cash registers. We’re talking about the not-quite-beating heart of Mannequin Nation.
Dozens of mannequin heads stacked cheek-to-jowl in the front window of a wig store. Headless mannequins dressed in patriotic red, white, and blue finery. Like something out of a cable TV crime drama, a lone female model, dressed for summer sun, on the front deck of a house literally down by the river with a sign reading Lobo’s Lair.
Mannequins cheer on the Pittsburgh Steelers—in their own way—and advertise political candidates on crime scene cleanup coveralls. (“Shut up and do your job!”) Mannequins hawk vape store offerings—like we need another reason to try Juul strawberry lemondade e-cigs, am I right? Along with the rest of us, mannequins have their own pandemic concerns to worry about and get left out on the curb for big garbage day.
Bored fashion mannequins—hey, you’d be bored too if you had to sit still for months at a time!—wait to catch the eyes of sidewalk strollers. Arty mannequins with paint-cracked skin, ridiculous wigs, and detached hands look for a whole different type of attention. Mannequins are relegated to the side porch with the cat box and dumped in construction sites like stool pigeons who’ve squawked for the last time.
One more note for the heads (ha!): no discussion of Pittsburgh-area mannequin fever should leave out Randyland—the city’s grand buffet of mutant mannequins. The central North Side artvironment has a little bit of everything and whole lot of over-the-top. That includes mannequins—available any time you need them—hand painted, accessorized, and ready to party. A must, when you’ve got the fever.
Lastly, a big shout-out to our sister blog The Portland Orbit whose recent story Whatever Happened to Mannequin Fever? got us up off the thinkin’ chair and digging through the archives for a suitable answer post, many years in the making.
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.
Beauty City. Pittsburgh Beauty Bar, South Side
Last fall, we watched with disbelief as a tenant finally moved into the empty retail space at Penn & Main and opened its doors for business. That prime corner had sat unoccupied for at least two decades*, and El Sabor Latin Kitchen inexplicably added another Mexican restaurant to the same block as Los Cabos during a global pandemic. Let’s just say the whole thing was front page news at Chez Orbit. But when those big Penn Avenue windows came dressed in a decal with an original logo of the Pittsburgh skyline embedded in a hot pepper, well, let’s just say it made the last twenty of years of head-scratching make a lot more sense. The landlords were just looking for the right tenant all along.
Hot Pepper City: El Sabor, Bloomfield
The downtown Pittsburgh skyline–spiky towers at PPG Place, Highmark’s pointed angle, the big block of the USX (neé US Steel) tower, a couple of bridges if we’re lucky–just won’t be contained. Here it is, the Orbit‘s seventh trip down this particular road and we’ll no longer be foolish enough to think we’ve bagged them all. You get a new restaurant today and there will always still be an untapped pizzeria, plumber, real estate agency, or left-in-the-woods slate stencil art tomorrow.
It is a beautiful (and sunny!) day out there. Go out and find your own Pittsburgh skyline.
[Special thanks to Greg Lagrosa who is working the micro-beat of food trucks with the Pittsburgh skyline temporarily parked in Verona hard.]
Sandwich City. Pittsburgh Sandwich Society food truck, Verona [note: skyline made of *sandwiches*!] [photo: Greg Lagrosa]
Eatz City. PGH EATZ food truck, Verona [photo: Greg Lagrosa]
Paw City. Point Breeze Veterinary Clinic
Sale City. Pollack Real Estate sign, South Side
Your Town City. Your Town Realty
Big A City. Arkham Realty & Property Management
Cheese City. Pops & Son Pizzeria, Brighton Heights [photo: Kristen Sarver]
Deli City. Shop’n’Save, Lawrenceville
All Day City. Alioto’s, Etna
Skyline stencil on piece of slate left under a mysterious Christmas tree along Emerald View Trail City. Mt. Washington
Pandemic Rainbow Heart City. Key Bank, Downtown
Rainbow city. UPMC Children’s Hospital, Lawrenceville
There are only so many ways a blogger can say, man, does this city we like to include its downtown skyline on stuff or what? But as long as graphic designers are abstractifying and color-blocking the recognizable shapes of US Steel tower, PPG’s spiky glass horns, the Highmark building’s hypodermic needle, etc., we’ll be there to take the pictures and do our best at pithy photo captioning.
In this, The Orbit‘s (gulp) sixth time returning to this seemingly-inexhaustible well, those general building blocks, often bookended with the Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne bridges, appear in business logos, commercial signage, product packaging, and even one delightful 3-D rendering as tribute for the Heroes at Work essential workers at Children’s Hospital.
Keep well, y’all. To paraphrase the great Casey Kasem, keep your feet on the ground and keep looking at the skyline!
Skyline on skyline. Howlers, Bloomfield
Venn diagram city[1]. New City Commons, Downtown
A city on the move. University of Pittsburgh bus, Oakland
Clean and jerk city. Legends of Pittsburgh gym, Pittsburgh Mills mall
Air conditioner city. Artist & Craftsman Supply, Squirrel Hill
Blue city. Metro Club, Downtown
Black and gold city. Food for Thought deli, Oakland
Fart joke city. Pittsburgh Potty
Glass city. Smokestack Glass, Lawrenceville
Smoky/smoking city. Iron Lung, Bloomfield
Pasta city. Pittsburgh Pasta, Bloomfield Shur-Save
Double skylines! Greater Pittsburgh Plumbing van[3]
Outline city. Steel City Line-X, Creighton
Vague notion of a city[2]. Civilization PGH, Lawrenceville
A city with a big heart. Steel City Craft Emporium, Strip District
Domed city. Pittsburgh Fitness Project, Lawrenceville
Dogburgh. Bernard Dog Run, Lawrenceville
Pittsburgh: the only city with a front door *and* a roof! C&M Roofing & Remodeling
[1] Not sure if this is intentional, but it’s been said that Pittsburgh sits at the Venn diagram between East Coast, Midwest, and Appalachia–and is none of them. If that was the goal with New City Commons’ design, we think it’s pretty clever.
[2] The outline depicted in Civilization PGH’s storefront window may or may not be taken from some neighborhood in Pittsburgh, but it’s certainly not downtown. Though we make it a policy to skip the generic/clip art cityscapes we come across all too often, we chose to include this one because … maybe it’s Pittsburgh?
[3] Orbit superfans will know we included Greater Pittsburgh Plumbing’s black-and-gold city skyline logo in a previous post, but this skyline-on-skyline double image was unique enough to warrant the re-up.
Pittsburgh Orbit 