Monday, February 21, 2011

Daily mortality reminder: Ghost Signs of Chicago

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As I may have mentioned a couple dozen times, my guide to the dive bars of Boston is about to be published in April from the fine folks at IG Publishing. It's as much a fun guide to the best shit holes to drink piss-water in today next to old people as it is a sort of depressing eulogy for all of the disappearing independent businesses that have been, and are still being pushed out by gentrification and rising real estate prices.

One of the bars I spent time in is called the Bus Stop Pub. Inside there's a series of murals on the walls that are a dense grouping of caricatures painted one on top of the next. “Some are famous people. A lot of them are old regulars,”  Devin the bartender told me.

“You can tell they're all pretty old if you get a look at their duds," he said. "Some come in still, but they're barely recognizable. It's been years since the artist who did them has come in, but from what I hear customers would drop him like ten or fifteen bucks and he'd have them up on the wall in twenty minutes. If you look over in the corner there are some sketches that he never got around to finishing.”


As I write in the book, "They're actually more like ghostly outlines of long lost regulars. Every dive bar has those, just not literally like this. As time goes by, the memories, and the customers fade." How poignant.

Those portraits on the walls, and the bars I discovered in general, reminded me of this project from Chicago artist Nicole Donohoe called Ghost Signs: Traces of Chicago's History (via io9) in which she's documenting the rapidly fading advertisements on the sides of buildings. Many of the products, never mind the people who originally painted them, don't exist anymore. There's a section on her page where you can look for similar projects in your city, be it New York, Baltimore, Brussels, Minnesota, or whatever. Check out a few of my favorites after the jump and try to keep in mind that although it's a short run, at least we get to drink whiskey before we die. 













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3 comments:

wheth said...

Maybe we're all already dead.

said...

man i hope so. most mediocre version of heaven/hell ever.

Anonymous said...

I'm not going to die so this doesn't really apply to me.

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