Mystery sign, mystery location

[657 East Fordham Road, Bronx, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Roaming around the Bronx, I happened upon this address, three quarters of it in shadow. I wondered about the signage. Above the door: UNIFORMS. Above the first-floor windows: OF UNIFORMS. (HOUSE is likely what’s obscured.) But the sign in front of the second-story windows? The sunlight is just enough to turn it into a mystery.

[“LEADERS IN [what?] DRESS.” Click for a larger view.]

I’ve tried adjusting the contrast and sharpening the image, but no soap. LEADERS In [what?] DRESS: my best guess is HORSEMEN’S, but that’s only a guess. The symbols to the left are perfectly readable but a greater mystery. The P with the line through it resembles both the ruble sign and the staurogram. Perhaps it’s a personal brand of some sort.

[December 8: Readers have suggested that the unreadable word is EQUESTRIAN or HUNTING. Both are plausible. Or maybe HUNTER’S. A reader who checked the 1940 census found the Palmieri family at this address. That must have something to do with the P. The census lists Michael Palmieri’s occupation as uniform maker.]

What I didn’t realize when I found this address is that I had stumbled onto the future location of Faculty Memorial Hall, a building just off the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University, holding classrooms, offices, and (now) food. A Fordham chronology tells me that FMH was converted in 1966 from “a five-story commercial loft building.” That would be this building at no. 655.

I was an undergrad and later a teaching assistant in FMH. I remember the long walk to the building, out from the campus to a small stretch of Belmont Avenue. I remember the coffee machine. I remember the narrow staircases, one up, one down. I remember smoking True cigarettes while teaching. I remember sitting in on Jim Doyle’s hours-long optional class to get through Four Quartets . I remember the Elvis Pretzel man, who stationed himself at the Belmont Avenue entrance to the building. That stretch of Belmont was and is a dead end, not traversable in Google Maps.

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