New York Frame And Picture Company

similar to the ad from the 1909 Brooklyn Bridge picture
The image above is from Frank Jump's great fading ad site

1909: The Bachelor

The play being advertised as seen previously in the 1909 Brooklyn Bridge photo

Fletcher's Castoria: Then And Now

Formerly on the building just north of the Church Of Sea And Land. I believe it was painted over some time in the last ten years.

Fletcher's Castoria: We Can Work It Out

The faded building, or ghost ads, were mentioned before back in December of 2007
I wonder why folks were obsessed with laxatives in the "old" days

Try to see it my way,
Do I have to keep on talking till I can't go on?
While you see it your way,
Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone.
Chorus:
We can work it out,
We can work it out.
Verse #2
Think of what you're saying.
You can get it wrong and still you think that it's all right.
Think of what I'm saying,
We can work it out and get it straight, or say good night.
Chorus:
We can work it out,
We can work it out.
Bridge:
Life is very short, and there's no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend.
I have always thought that it's a crime,
So I will ask you once again.
Verse #3
Try to see it my way,
Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong.
While you see it your way
There's a chance that we might fall apart before too long.
Chorus:
We can work it out,
We can work it out.
Bridge:
Life is very short, and there's no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend.
I have always thought that it's a crime,
So I will ask you once again.
Verse #4
Try to see it my way,
Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong.
While you see it your way
There's a chance that we might fall apart before too long.
Chorus:
We can work it out,
We can work it out.

Brooklyn Bridge 1909: Close Up

This is a close up of the upper left hand corner of the image from the last post. Notice the uncompleted stage of the Manhattan Bridge. I count five Fletcher's Castoria ads, one Uneeda Biscuit and one Benson's Porous Plaster.
The current ownership of the Fletcher's Castoria, now Laxative, is the Centaur Company

Fletcher's Castoria, now known as Fletcher's Laxative, is an oral syrup containing a stimulant laxative and ingredients to soothe the stomach.
* Active laxative ingredient: senna, 33.3 mg/ml
* Other ingredients: citric acid, flavor, glycerin, methylparaben, propylparaben, purified water, sodium benzoate, sucrose
* Non-alcoholic
* Non-prescription
Acts within 6-12 hours.
There are no known drug interactions, although as a stimulant laxative it may affect how long a medicine remains in the digestive tract. It is best not to take senna within 1 to 2 hours of taking other medicines.
Use wisely. Senna can be habit-forming.
Fletcher's Castoria seems to have been renamed Fletcher's Laxative for Kids, and the Castoria name no longer appears on the product web site. Although marketed as a children's laxative in the US, it is effective for adults.
Once a staple of drug stores, Castoria is becoming difficult to find.
On May 12, 1868, the United States Patent Office granted a patent to Dr. Samuel Pitcher (1824-1907) of Barnstable, Massachusetts, for a cathartic composed of senna, sodium bicarbonate, essence of wintergreen, taraxicum, sugar and water.The remedy was initially sold under the name Pitcher's Castoria. Over time the product formula has changed.
In 1871, The Centaur Company was formed by Charles Henry Fletcher to purchase the rights to and manufacture Pitcher's Castoria. It was renamed Fletcher's Castoria.
Castoria was the subject of one of the most significant campaigns in early mass advertising. Castoria ads from the 1870s through 1920s are still visible today (or at least were between the 1970s and 2005) on the buildings of New York. At the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, there were Castoria ads on virtually every blank wall in sight. They are quite visible in images of the opening of the bridge.There were two "Fletcher's Castoria" B-17 Flying Fortress bombers during World War II, both part of the 100th Bomber Group. The first was lost, but the crew survived. The second survived the war. Its pilot was William H. Fletcher (not a descendant of Charles Henry Fletcher), hence its name.
The Centaur Company was acquired by Sterling Drug during the 1920s. In 1984, Sterling Drug sold Fletcher's Castoria to Mentholatum Co., Inc.

Brooklyn Bridge 1909

A close up of the image reveals several building painted ads such as one for a play called, "The Bachelor," an ad for the NY Frame and Picture Company, one for the circus and of course the ubiquitous Fletcher's Castoria

from the library of congress

Ghost Ads: The Hieroglyphics Of A Bygone New York

A viewing of this site's archival photos can't help but reveal all of the painted advertising on the building sides. It also reveals that people were pretty obsessed with "regularity" as Fletcher's Kastoria was dominant. Those painted on signs were the primary print media of the time. Many of those ads are still around, but they're fading fast. Sometimes "new" ones become revealed when an adjoining building is demolished, but now everything is getting demolished. The images from the above movie (the audio is Brenda Russell's) were taken over 5 years ago, mostly by Frank Jump, and some of them have vanished. BTW, the Zaccaro Real Estate Ad is from the family of John Zaccaro, Geraldine Ferraro's husband. I believe he owned property on Market Street at one time Frank Jump's site is an encyclopedic source of these ghost signs and there's plenty of accompanying history. The site loads slowly because of that. Frank now has a blog site as well. Here's a nytimes article about Frank from 2005:
Painted Signs, Relics of a Bygone New York, Become Even More Rare
By JOSEPH BERGER
They are hieroglyphics of a bygone New York, writings on walls redolent of a time when women wore corsets, nearly every parlor seemed to have a piano and buggies couldbe hired for a genteel ride up the avenue once a blacksmith shod the horses.
Signs painted on the sides of humdrum brick buildings advertised such wares and services, in bold block letters accompanied occasionally by an evocative sketch. Amateur archaeologists can still unearth them, faded and weathered as they are, by hey evoke the exuberant period of American capitalism," said Kathleen Hulser, public historian of the New-York Historical Society. "Consumer cultures were really getting going and there weren't many rules yet, no landmarks preservation commission or organized community saying: 'Isn't this awful? There's a picture of a man chewing tobacco on the corner of my street.' "
While a century ago, preservation groups viewed the signs as vulgar interlopers, some now want to sustain them. They seem like remnants of "a more civilized time," Ms. Hulser said.
The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, however, has decided that it will not protect what it calls "ghost signs," according to Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman. "The commission protects architectural features and the commission does not consider the painted signs a significant feature," she said. No one has applied for a landmark designation for a painted sign in years, Ms. Jackier said.
Signs that are threadbare but still visible recall workhorse department stores like Gimbels and Hearns and men's clothing shops like Rogers Peet. They evoke a time when apartment buildings like the Warwick Arms at 101 West 80th Street trumpeted ULTRA MODERN APARTMENTS with GLASS SHOWER ENCLOSURES and when bowling alleys like McLEAN BOWL-O-DROME, which opened in 1942 along the Yonkers border, lured customers by boasting of air-conditioning.
At a three-story brick building at 109 West 17th Street that is now a Japanese furniture shop, wording painted on the exterior alerts buyers to a former incarnation of the building: TO LET /CARRIAGES COUPES HANSOMS VICTORIAS LIGHT WAGONS/ HORSES BOARD BY THE MONTH.
According to Walter Grutchfield, 69, one of three buffs who maintain Web sites devoted to photographs of the signs, the building was a livery stable from 1900 to 1905, owned by Patrick Logan, whose Irish roots are detectable in stone clover leaves set into niches in the building's facade.
Not too far away on the side of 151 West 19th Street is white Italic lettering alongside a sketch of a scissors for Griffon SHEARS SCISSORS. Griffon Cutlery Works, which also sold nail files, tweezers and manicure sets, used the building as its headquarters from 1920 into the 1960's.
The scissors suggest that homemakers typically did their own sewing well into the 1960's, an observation corroborated a few blocks north along Seventh Avenue with a sign for Necchi sewing machines, complete with a drawing of a machine with gracefully curving legs.

A sales office for Necchi, an active Italian company, opened at 154 West 25th street in 1949, but has long closed.

Charles Scribner III, whose family founded the legendary publishing house that bears his name, said that every time he drove down Ninth Avenue toward the Lincoln Tunnel, he delighted in the SCRIBNERS sign on the side of a 14-story red-brick building at 311 West 43rd Street.

For him, it recalls the glory days when Scribner's, now known as the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster, published Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The building, which opened in 1907, was the publisher's printing plant and warehouse - Hemingway's shotgun shells were also stored there - and Scribner's sold it 1955 when, like other companies, it found printing in New York too expensive.

"There were probably boxes of the first edition of 'The Great Gatsby' stored there that would now be worth more than the building itself," Mr. Scribner said, noting that a jacketed first edition of the book sells for $150,000.
The tearing down of old buildings in Times Square has given some once-obscured old signs a fleeting exposure. One of the last signs in the area - for J.A. KEAL'S CARRIAGE MANUFACTORY REPAIRING on Broadway and 47th Street - was suddenly revealed around 1998 when the adjacent building was torn down. But it was concealed again the next year once a new building began rising on the same spot.
The Bronx is still a gold mine, but construction to fill in the gaps in streets once plagued by arson is hiding or destroying many signs. Murals for the laxative Fletcher's Castoria were once ubiquitous in working-class areas and one in yellow lettering can still be seen on 134th Street between Alexander and Lincoln Avenues.
But an 80-year-old Castoria mural on 180th Street and Belmont Avenue is no longer visible. One of the quainter Bronx signs, NEMUTH BLACKSMITH WELDING, can still be glimpsed on a ramshackle garage-like building on Halperin Avenue in the Eastchester section.
Along Bruckner Boulevard, a handful of lingering signs, like the one for JEWEL PIANO CO., attest to the South Bronx's fame as a hub of piano manufacturing before World War I. According to the Bronx Historical Society Web site, piano manufacturing began to die off with the advent first of phonographs, then radio, then television. The last plant closed in the 1970's.
Until recent years, an ESTEY PIANO CO. sign just below the clock on a late 19th-century building popularly known as the Clocktower hinted at the lyrical age when every home seemed to have a piano. But the building has been rented out for residential lofts, and the Estey sign has been scrubbed away.
Older signs are being preserved, virtually, through the Internet. Frank H. Jump, a 45-year-old Brooklyn schoolteacher, sells photographs of the signs for $750 each through his Web site, www.frankjump.com. A favorite is the gold-on-blue sign at 147th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard for Omega Oil, a snake-oil concoction once used for sunburn, weak backs and stiff joints.
As someone who received a diagnosis of AIDS 22 years ago, he sees the painted signs as "metaphors for survival." So he was heartbroken to see another favorite, a spectral azure sign advertising a 19th-century laundry whitener, RECKITT'S BLUE/ THE PUREST AND BEST, on a three-story building at 622 Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, obscured by a new building. It had once been featured in articles about his curious obsession.
"That one hurt the most," he said.