Highland Park demo reveals ghost sign

[old guy]

Any guess about what the next sign to the right of the Faygo sign, hiding behind the graffiti wall is? Looks like maybe a Kowalski sign.

[Wheels]

Is there a website that has a collection of all of these ghost signs? I would imagine they'd be destroyed by graffitti artists or further demolitions, so it would at least be nice if they were preserved on the internet. Really interesting bits of history.

This site has a large collection of ghost signs.
http://www.detroitfunk.com/

[DetroitZack]

Any guess about what the next sign to the right of the Faygo sign, hiding behind the graffiti wall is? Looks like maybe a Kowalski sign.

That's was my assumption.

[EastsideAl]

Love that Honor Bright sign from the Times article. Boys playing in ties? Boys' "blouses"? "Playsuits"?!? Like so many of these things, it's a fleeting window into an almost entirely lost social history.

[EastsideAl]

C. F. Smith had their grocery stores in nearly every neighborhood in Detroit in the thirties and forties...

Both my grandmother and my father worked for CF Smith stores at different times as young people. In the late '30s my father was a 13 year delivery boy for the CF Smith store on Charlevoix near Chalmers, when he wasn't otherwise busy going to Jackson Intermediate, working in my grandfather's nearby bar, or delivering the Detroit Times.

CF Smith was part of an earlier model of small neighborhood grocery stores, and were killed off by the perceived greater convenience and modernity of the new "self-serve" supermarkets. But my Dad often talks nostalgically of the old pre-self-service grocery stores where customers interacted directly with the clerks, like Smith's

[Cincinnati_Kid]

Nice pics! They used good paint back then...

Yeah, with lots of lead, probably why it still shows well.