Vernacular Design

"A store sign had to be bold, eye-catching and immediately recognizable, so that customers would understand the purpose of the establishment," writes Steven Heller in the New York Times (4/65/09). "Clever names designed to tickle the imagination would not do," he continues. "What you saw was what you got: Bakery, Drugstore, Smoke Shop, Meat Market, Liquors, Dry Cleaners."

Such signs are of a disappearing kind, but are the subject of "Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York," a coffee-table book by James T. Murray and Karla L. Murray. The authors "have been photographing storefronts for more than eight years, and in this book … they track their odyssey from the Lower East Side to Harlem to the Bronx, from Brooklyn to Queens to Staten Island."

While their photographs "do not romanticize" the storefronts, they capture a bygone "era of sign painting and storefront innocence … The book is also a study of urban migration, featuring Jewish delis and Italian "lattinici freschi" stores downtown, Hispanic bodegas and Irish bars uptown, and white-bread Howard Johnson’s in Midtown (now gone) … If you’re at all interested in the passing cityscape, this book is a documentary motherlode; if you’re happy to see these joints disappear, it might at least kindle appreciation for them."