Foreign Lands: Where's The Schnitzel?

We're back in St. Paul, where I found a gem of a place.  Not surprisingly, it's near the railroad tracks, but it's also right on 7th St, but over on the east side.  I'm not confident that we're going to find a lot in the history category, but it's a pretty cool building with great signs.

Today, it seemed to be low-end housing, although when I stopped there was a fancy SUV parked out front, which in my fantasy meant people planning to renovate.  We'll have to see.

Anyway, as you can see, Charles E. Eschbach seemed to have a meat market here.  It seems the Charles was born in 1890 and lived only until 1959.  His son was also named Charles and is buried in Elmhurst Cemetery in St. Paul.  It seems he might have furnished some meat to a family quarantined due to small pox in 1900, but that's about all I have.

So let's look for the flour.  It seems the Dwight Flour was from Moorhead (speaking of traitorous foreign lands), so that probably explains why the place isn't still operating.  Although this ad suggest maybe they were in Minneapolis too. So confusing.  But one thing is clear. It was made from only Red River wheat.

Someone already got better pictures than mine (better light and more capable photographer, probably) and posted them to Flickr.  It sees that some of the neighbors are gone.

Stop Me If You've Seen This One Before

Or better yet, don't.  Because if you've been following along, you have, indeed, scene this one before.  Or to be a bit more accurate, you've seen other parts of these "extensive works" before.  This one is a little down the railroad tracks from the one you've seen before, but presumably they were all part of that same facility at some time.

The news here, if you can call it that, is that I'd swear the missing part of the sign says "Albany" and "New York," although I have to admit it could be bad memories of the bar exam influencing my intuition.  I don't know why it would say that, of course, as it seems that they may have had offices in the Lumber Exchange downtown, but whatever.  Maybe they just had a special affinity for the capitol of the Empire State.

Let's finish up by looking a up a bit (please shield you eyes from the sun):

Think Up Your Own Lame Double Entendre, Please

It's been awhile since we had a legit post around here (yes, I'm looking at you and you), so I went back into my photo archive and found a real honest-to-goodness, Minneapolis, paint-on-brick, from back in the day, aging-but-preserved ghost sign for you.  You can thank me later.

The signs, for stores, factory, storage and warehouse space, may tell us something about the industrial history of the building, or it could just be Andrews Inc advertising for what they can offer nearby.  But regardless, this was once a commercial building downtown, so it must still be in commercial use, right?  No, of course not, silly.  It's "lofts" now!  What could be better?

Well, for the Sexton, perhaps lots of things could have been better.  It seems to have had rather a rough conversion into hip, urban living space.  Everyone involved seems to have sued each other, and residents were apparently promised a parking ramp (that's garage, if you don't speak Minnesotan) that never materialized.  I could probably make this whole post out of the saga of the Sexton suits, but that seems snore-inducing, so I'm going to write about other stuff after this next picture:

So, as I often do, I've tried to find some of the actual history on the building, before its troubled condo conversion, but I've not found a lot.  This guy seemed to promise to tell me something about it, but when you strip out the stuff from 2007 & 2008, he really just says it was an old warehouse.  Yeah, we knew that.

Here's what I've got for actual history: a photo of the building looking sharp in 1924, another showing cobbled streets in front from the next year, and two from 1938 inside the building depicting what's described as a "hospital admissions project."  At least these tell us something about the age of the building.  Now.  Are you ready for a tangent or two?

I knew you were.  Okay.  So having found little about the building itself, I got curious about its namesake.  There must have been someone named Sexton around, right? It seems there were at least two fellows with that name who popped up right away in my searches.  The first is a true Twin Cities old timer.  Gus Sexton was lumberjack and logging camp operator along the St. Croix dating back to the 1870s who seemed to get his picture taken fairly regularly.  He also seems to have given money for a pipe organ at St. Michael's church and owned property in Stillwater.  Unfortunately, we all know the good citizen's of Minneapolis wouldn't allow a foreigner from the east side of the river to own a building on our glorious soil, so Gus probably isn't our guy.

A more likely suspect might be this fellow, Charles W. Sexton, pictured in 1919.  It seems he was in the insurance game, if he's the guy mentioned in Best's Insurance Reports in 1922, but it also seems that he didn't live terribly long after that picture was taken, as Best's says he was deceased at the time of its report.  William Gray Purcell seems to have written to his company to make a claim in 1915.  He was apparently also a lawyer and his daughter seems to have married a lawyer, so maybe it's best not to speak of him anymore.

Foreign Lands: Perfunctorie

So I seem to be stuck in a rut of short, not-terribly-informative posts.  But it's been awhile so I wanted to get something up.  Also, I recently got back from vacation, and certain people wanted foreign signs, so here you go.

This one is in Sartene, Corsica.  The town's great.  Go.  Visit.  It's cool.  This is where "vendetta" comes from.  In the tiny warrens of windy streets, you don't want to make an enemy.

Otherwise, while the trip was really great, and the island really beautiful, there wasn't much for paint-on-brick advertising.  We ended the trip in Paris, where there were certainly some possible ghost signs, but we had so little time there that I couldn't justify spending time wandering the fading industrial parts.

So we're stuck with a just a former library.  I don't know how old it is.  All I know about it is that it's for you:

Quickie

One last quick pre-vacation update post.  Apparently my timing was pretty good, as the Burch Pharmacy signs are now gone.  That's a little sad to me, but I guess I can see why the fancy new restaurant that's going into this space doesn't want old plastic signs for a non-existent business hanging around.  Still, my proto-preservationist heart thinks there's a way to design it that keeps the signs, or at least some of them.

Anyway, the building currently has no windows, so it's kind of interesting to stand on the street and look inside.  It could turn out to be a pretty cool space.

Foreign Lands: Back In The Saddle Again

I'm busy getting ready for vacation, so this will be a quick one.  It's from my old neighborhood in Washington, DC.  If you've lived in the area for a long time, you'd probably call the neighborhood Shaw.  If you are a realtor trying to market a property, you'd probably call it Logan Circle or Convention Center, because you like a little puffery and somehow Shaw's proud history as a center of African American culture sadly doesn't sell.

Anyway, this just south of O St. in an alley called Naylor Court NW.  The location always makes me scratch my head because as you can see in these other photos, the alley has undergone some recent renovations and now features lovely brick paving.  It looks great these days.  But I could swear that back in 2002 when I served on a DC grand jury, we heard evidence in a horrific violent crime in an alley with a similar name.  I may be misremembering, or I may not and gentrification has set in.

Unfortunately I don't know much about the J.P. Turner or his Hospital for Horses and Dogs, but it's a safe bet that they are long gone.

Livin' It Up Until We Hit The Ground

I've got some more foreign signs to work through in the backlog, not a few of which are from trucking and storage, but let's break things up a little and try to stay at home just a bit, so let's head out to Longfellow again.  As I promised, we've got more grain elevators.

The elevator's probably a bit older, but the sign looks to me like it's not from all that far back.  Harvest States should be a familiar brand to those from the Upper Midwest.  Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why, but I've heard of them, which means you should have too.

That said, it doesn't seem to say "Cenex Harvest States," so maybe that means the sign dates from before the merger of those two cooperatives in 1998.  The combined entity calls itself CHS, Inc. now, but it's still headquartered here in Minnesota, in Inver Grove Heights.  I'm not going to go too much into the company's complicated history of combinations and divestitures, but I was surprised to see among the many different transactions that Harvest States owned the Holsum brand.

It's hard to tell, at least to the untrained eye, whether this sort of facility is still in use, but it didn't look like it to me, except maybe as a cell phone tower (I think that's what those vertical rectangular things are).

Foreign Lands: Company Town?

I spent a recent Friday morning wandering around the older-looking parts of Sioux City, Iowa, in oppressive heat, and, surprise, I found more than a few ghost signs.  As it turned out, however, an overwhelming majority of them, on multiple buildings, were from a single company.  So, rather than risk turning this place into Ghost Signs of a Single Company of Sioux City, I'm going to bundle all the signs for them in a single post.  Prepare yourselves, people, as this is going to be a longer post (at least in terms of number of pictures).  I may even try to add a new trick to my magic blogging bag too.

I judged the picture up top there as the best of them, so, let's all take a moment to enjoy its beauty and clarity.  We don't get a good sign like this every day, Richard (okay, family inside joke there, if you don't get it, my apologies).  You probably have, however, heard of Bekins and seen their big green logo on a side of the truck.  But unless you're some sort of van lines fanboy or something (which probably is a thing), I bet you didn't know that Bekins was founded right here in River Ci... er.. Sioux City back in 1891 by brothers Martin and John Bekins.

The sign up top, and the next few below, are from a building wrapped in them just to the west of downtown at 4th St. and Wesley Parkway.  The one up top faces south and should be visible as you travel up Wesley.  This one's on the back, facing up the hill:

Once again, we're reminded how the fireproof thing seemed to be a point of advertising distinction back in the day.  There must have been fire everywhere.  If it was still there, we could have stopped in at the office at 419 4th St. to inquire, but alas, that's a Hom Furniture store now.

And with that, before this post gets so long as to take over the entire front page, let's try for some of that blogging magic.  Follow me after the jump, assuming I can figure out how to add one, pretty please.

Updates

Okay, so, a quick post with updates on prior signs that have had disturbance in their environments recently.

First up, as I mentioned before, the H.A. Holden Company now houses a Lunds wine shop.  Those good folks have preserved the sign, as you can see here:

There is also a plaque inside that says that the right-ward portion of the building, which now houses the walk-in beer cooler, is the original portion of the structure, which started out as a home.  I thought that was kind of interesting and cool of them to post.

There is also news at what was supposed to be The Nicollet.  Renovations are afoot, and the space seems finally destined to be put back into use, although not for a massive condo building as used to be the plan.  For now, the birds around the back are still undisturbed, but that may not continue to be the case.

Good news too for McDonald brothers.  Well, not so much news, as something I recently noticed, which is that the sign if readily visible from the seats behind home plate at Target Field, which is nice (look very closely just above the right-field jumbotron):

Finally, the Holsum thrift bakery sign has once again been cleared of its tags:

I'm not sure who thinks it's a good use of resources to keep removing graffiti from an otherwise derelict building, but it seems to be a pattern.

The Damper Flapper

It's post #120, so that means we need a landmark.  As seems to be a developing pattern, I don't have paint on brick for one, but I do have one that visitors to town are likely to see.  In fact, I've been seeing this one while driving north on 35W toward downtown for years.  And yet it retained some amount of mystery because despite being readily visible it's sort of in an out of the way neighborhood tucked in next to the freeway.

So, one day, I went looking for it.  From the highway, you can see the clearly-marked smokestack above, but you can also see the big "Wells Fargo Home Mortgage" sign on the neighboring office building.  I thought that meant that the two companies existed in close proximity, but I was wrong.  This is no longer a Honeywell facility.  It just says that on the sign.  So, I guess that means it's a legit ghost.

Honeywell is one of those company's that, if you grew up in the Twin Cities, you had friends whose parents worked there.  It's a step beyond household name.  So much so that I always thought my former colleagues helping to prevent the GE/Honeywell merger awhile back meant that it would remain a Minnesota-based company.  But it seems I'm wrong and the company has its headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey.  It seems a 1999 merger already moved it away.

Nonetheless, the next shot gives us a glimpse into its real origins:

In case you can't read it, the sign says "The Minneapolis Honeywell Regulator Co., 1885-1928."  The company's history starts with a man named Albert Butz inventing a means of regulating the temperature of a coal furnace in 1885.  The precursor of the thermostat was born.  The company didn't get the disappointingly vague, yet geographically specific name of Minneapolis Heat Regulator (see below) until 1898, when the appropriately named R.W. Sweatt bought and renamed it.  A merger with Mark Honeywell's company in 1927 led to the name in the sign above.

You can't really read it, a the sun wasn't cooperating with my photography, but the top of the tower below says, "Minneapolis Heat Regulator."