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.
begin the tour
email me
go to my Toronto photo pages (includes more smaller-size pictures of ghost signs)
go to my home page
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
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