Changeable Signs

[Ace-Hy Sign Co., 306 Bowery, New York, New York, c. 1939–1941. Telephone: GRamercy 5-5493. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

A store for signs had better have a beautiful one.

Elaine and I walked along this stretch of the Bowery in the Before Times (May 2019). We had eaten lunch at Phebe’s Taven and Grill, 359 Bowery, which, as we later realized, was once the home of The Old Landmark Bar and Restaurant, a recurring location in the television series Naked City. After lunch we walked south to Rivington Street, to see an exhibition of works by Joe Brainard at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Here’s Ace-Hy testing the waters with small ads and, for whatever reason, a painful shortening of the company name:

[Popular Mechanics, December 1940 and January 1941. Click either image for a larger view.]

In 1948, Ace-Hy went big, with two display ads in an issue of Billboard. It appears that in addition to commerical signs, they sold what might be called junque, sometimes without a hyphen, sometimes with.

[Billboard, November 11, 1948. Click either image for a larger view.]

Back to a small ad, no hyphen:

[Billboard, February 12, 19, 26, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

Though there are still restaurant-supply stores on the Bowery, the Ace-Hy Sign Co. is long gone. The most recent occupant of 306 Bowery, as far as I can tell: an outpost of The New Stand, “a reinvented newsstand chain that describes itself as what would happen if ‘your favorite blog and your favorite bodega had a baby’”:

Half store, half app, New Stand shops carry a rotating mix of coffee, new media, fancy snacks, choice playlists, green juice, cheap art, high fashion, amusing GIFS, weird toys and tons of other interesting things depending on the day.

Google Maps shows the New Stand up and running in June 2019; the storefront windows were covered over by August 2021 and still covered in July 2022.

Trends in commerce: the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory has two-and-a-half columns of businesses beginning with Ace: Ace Buttonhole Co. (competing with Accurate Buttonhole Co.), Ace Hat Lining Co., Act Novelty Klothes, Ace Waste Materials. And there’s Ace Hy Linotyping, Ace Hy Prods Co., and — with a hyphen — Ace-Hy Novelty Co. Probably all related to the Ace-Hy Sign Co. If so, those other businesses must have had nice signs.

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An assiduous reader found references in Google Books to Ace-Hy Plastics, 306 Bowery, owned by H. Berman. So perhaps Hy was short for Hiram or Hyman.

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October 4: See also this Electric Light Tie.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[Those other Aces might not have been storefront establishments. Whatever they were, there’s no sign of them in the tax photographs.]