Signifier’s Skeletons: a brief history of Gowanus signs
Ride the F train past the Carroll Street station and you emerge from the tunnel into blinding daylight. Climbing nearly one hundred feet above the stagnating Gowanus Canal, you’re presented with sweeping views of South Brooklyn. Once your eyes adjust, they are inevitably drawn to the eight-story Kentile Floors billboard: huge purple block letters suspended from deceptively delicate steel supports.
Including Kentile, there are four such signs nearby, erected sixty or seventy years ago to advertise prosperous factories during Gowanus’ and Red Hook’s industrial boom time. Whether you regard these old billboards as icons, grave markers for now defunct companies or detritus that remains simply because they are too expensive to tear down, they continue to stand sentinel over the ever-shifting landscape of South Brooklyn.
The perspective from the elevation of the Smith-Ninth Street station includes distant shiny glass condo towers that wink seductively, promising Manhattan-chic with Brooklyn breathing space. Below crouches the boxy form of Lowe’s, hoarding aisles upon aisles of parking. Blocks away at the base of the Gowanus Expressway, crude modern billboards rise to flirt shamelessly with passing motorists. They posses none of the grace of their great uncles. Ultimately, your eyes are drawn back to the Kentile sign.
Kentile Floors, who once claimed to be “America's largest manufacturer of super-resilient floor tile," produced vinyl tiles that often contained asbestos, contributing to the factory’s demise in 1988. The distinctive neon sign remains, greeting passengers on the Culver Line from atop a warehouse at Ninth Street and Second Avenue. But it also charms at ground level. “I love the way the sign is such a strong visual focal point as you walk down the street,” says Greg Duncan, an architect and Boerum Hill resident.
Duncan isn’t the only one inspired by its prominent form. The manager of the Bell House, a year-old performance space on Seventh Street, designed the venue’s logo based on the structure of the Kentile sign. It was “a nod to the history of the industrial neighborhood,” explains co-owner Andrew Templar. Apropos, the bar’s front windows perfectly frame a view of its backside, best appreciated over an early evening cocktail. While a music venue might seem out of place among the construction companies, textile and signage manufacturers that inhabit the street, Templar maintains that he and his partners wanted to “build a place that felt like it had been there a long time.”
Nearby at Fourth Avenue and Sixth Street, a red and green lettered billboard perched atop a white warehouse announces the world headquarters of Eagle Clothes, who manufactured mens’ dress suits. The building now contains, less impressively, self storage and a U-Haul rental facility. Kevin Walsh, founder of Forgotten-NY.com and author of Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis, believes that this sign is “a relic of the time when men wore suits to work every day and you had to have at least five in your closet.” In these casual times, he reckons, “it stands there like a beacon of guilt. It says, ‘where's your suit and hat?’"
Paradoxically, the Eagle Clothes sign is overshadowed by a new notion of grandeur. The nearby eight-story Hotel Le Bleu, which claims to be the first luxury boutique hotel in Brooklyn, ridiculously rents rooms for over $250 per night...next door to Staples. The twelve-story Argyle, a stucco-faced atrocity, confronts Fourth Avenue with mechanical vents and a gaping garage door, yet condos here sell for nearly one million dollars. And to add insult to injury, both developments brazenly claim to be located in the heart of Park Slope, defying the scale and industrial nature of the surrounding warehouses.
The billboard for Bruno Truck Sales, which is mounted on a New York City Sanitation Building at Hamilton Avenue and Fourteenth Street to engage motorists on the Expressway, holds its ground at the end of the Second Avenue industrial corridor, an area thus far untouched by such developers. Zoning ordinances permit commercial operations, such as Bruno’s, and light industrial outfits, including automotive repair shops and hardware suppliers. Although developers might salivate at the chance to build condo towers thrusting above the Expressway to command those panoramic harbor views, that hopefully won’t be allowed anytime soon.
Bruno’s sign is similar to Eagle Clothes’ with its classic red lettering accentuated by green, but Bruno didn’t shy away from adding a little bling: Mercedes and Volvo emblems proudly adorn the billboard. Not satisfied with having only one sign, Bruno installed a newer one below the Expressway that proclaims “Nobody Beats Bruno!” in bright pink letters. And perhaps it’s true: Bruno is still in business, unlike the others who left their signs behind.
On the other side of the Expressway in Red Hook, the fourth gigantic metal skeleton looms above Coffey Park from a large beige warehouse at Richards and Verona Streets. Originally occupied by paper goods manufacturer E.J. Trum, the building was later bought by John Turano & Sons Furniture. Turano wanted to remove the letters and apply his own name. Most of them came down, but the letter ‘R’ proved onerous, so it remains along with a single period.
Perhaps this R, period came to stand for the independent spirit of Red Hook, cut off from surrounding neighborhoods by the Expressway to the east and the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel to the north. Maybe now it stands for Revitalization. Hip newcomers like Fort Defiance and Good Fork receive rave culinary reviews, while the infamous blue and yellow IKEA provides furnishings for many gentrified apartment dwellers.
The R sign, however, stares down a grittier side of Red Hook that is populated with abandoned buildings, public housing and marked by racial divides. Here, changes are more subtle, such as the conversion of a warehouse at Hicks and Ninth Street into the new headquarters for the Red Hook Initiative, designed by DUMBO-based architecture firm super-interesting! The exterior will be revived with a “green wall,” and the formerly derelict building will house offices and program space for the non-profit community center, which benefits and employs area residents. “We share with the client a strong commitment to create a flexible, safe, healthy space that promotes community sustainability...on a particularly limited budget,” super-interesting! parter Kian Goh explains.
For better or worse, change is imminent in South Brooklyn, but the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC) hopes to foster a sense of community while preserving the integrity of the area. As part of a Community Vision Workshop series held by the GCCDC, a group of residents identified historic and special structures including the Kentile sign. While none of the old billboards in New York City are officially landmarked—not even the iconic Pepsi sign in Long Island City—residents feel they are special and should “influence plans for future development—to assist in creating a place that reflects the memories of the Gowanus community,” according to the final report.
In his New York Magazine article “Signs of the Times,” Mark Jacobsen declares that “there’s something un-American about not loving a giant sign.” You can even proclaim your love on a t-shirt: Zazzle.com sells shirts and onesies featuring the Kentile and Eagle Clothes signs. Though at one time or another most of these signs have been threatened by demolition in the name of progress, they are as deeply rooted in the sentiments of the people who live and work in these neighborhoods as they are in the buildings that support them. Like brick chimneys and water towers, these billboards have come to define the Brooklyn skyline, even if their neon letters no longer illuminate the night.
