Toronto Ghost Signs

Before the invention of modern billboards, sign painters used to paint advertisements and company names directly onto building walls. These gradually fading painted signs are known as ghost signs.

This site collects some of the ghost signs that can be seen on buildings in Toronto. Background information on the signs is provided whenever possible.

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go to my Toronto photo pages (includes more smaller-size pictures of ghost signs)

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Today, your brain is, as a matter of brute fact, full of stuff that was designed to affect you. As opposed to the scattered furniture of nature and history that people once registered just because it happened to be there... To get relief, you have to stumble into the Greyhound bus station in Albany, or some old side-street barbershop that time forgot, into someplace not yet subjected to the renovating ministrations of the International Red Brick and Iron Filigree Restoration Corporation. And "stumble" is the key concept here. Accidental places are the only real places left. - from "The Numbing of the American Mind", Thomas de Zengotita, Harper's, April 2002