The Walk of Fame

From Dave "Almost Famous" Brigham:

As regular readers of the blog and followers of the accompanying Instagram feed might recall, back in October, I was featured in a Boston Globe article about hunting for ghost signs. I walked through part of Boston's Fort Point neighborhood with the reporter, Nora McGreevy, and a Globe photographer, Jessica Rinaldi, who, I found out later, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Below are some of the photos I took that day, along with others I shot on a follow-up trip to a different part of the neighborhood.

I chose this area because a) it was close to South Station, where I eat lunch most times my son and I travel into the city, and b) I knew there was at least one ghost sign along Congress Street. The first backside-worthy element we saw was something Nora spied.

Located on the side of the Boston Children's Museum building, the Atlas Stores sign was a new one for me, and something quite different than I've seen in Fort Point or anywhere else in Boston. I assume it's been restored somewhat, as it pops out much more than other signs that are carved or bolted to building facades. Built in the late 19th century as a warehouse, this building is just one of dozens in this neighborhood that give locals and tourists a taste of the way much of Boston once looked (see June 25, 2019, "Wool-d You Like to Join Me For a Walk?" for more examples). I like that the sign is still there, asserting its sense of history over the Yawkey Center sign.

We also spotted several medallions for the Boston Wharf Company, which developed the Fort Point Channel neighborhood between 1836 and 1882.

Nora was pretty good at spotting signs. As a history buff and the person who birthed the idea for the Globe article, that's to be expected. While I was looking at one sign (discussed below), she saw (with her much younger eyes) the fading one below.

The six-story Putnam & Company building dates to 1888. I'm not sure what the company's business was, but I'm guessing warehousing.

In the meantime, I found another Boston Wharf Company sign, on a building erected in 1891.

Finally we made it to the sign I knew was there (below). I'd shot the rear of this building at the corner of Congress and A streets a few years back, and noticed while doing a Google maps search in advance of meeting with Nora that this side of the building was covered with old advertisements as well.

The sign is for Berman & Sons, which was involved in the metal fabrication industry. The building, which houses Lucky's Lounge on the ground floor, will soon (or perhaps does by now; I shot these in July) feature high-end condos. From this spot, we couldn't help but see one of the larger ghost signs in the city, not far away on A Street.

I'd shot this sign from a slightly different angle for the above-linked article about a previous visit to Fort Point. There are at least two layers of signs here. What we could make out related to the Terkelsen Building and Terkelsen Machine Co., which, according to a Flickr photo I found online, manufactured "spiral washing machines."

We headed back past the Berman & Sons ghost sign, and I realized that, like a hipster food truck vendor, the Giuffre's Building was covered in more ink than I'd expected.

I can't make out the sign above the first floor windows. Notice the top two floors, which were added on for the condo project.

The last thing I shot while walking with Nora and Jessica was the set of doors below, which face onto Melcher Street.

Melcher Street is parallel to Necco Court, which I checked out in late 2017 or early 2018 (see April 22, 2018, "Fort Point Channel -- It's Electric!"). Necco Court is named for the former New England Confectionary Company, which was headquartered here many years ago.

About two weeks after I walked this area with the Globe reporter and photographer, I started at the intersection of West Broadway and A Street in South Boston and headed east, ending up at the Berman & Sons ghost sign building. Here's some of what I saw.

I know this isn't a ghost sign, but I like the effort to give it a classic, old-school look. Barlow's Restaurant, a tavern offering traditional comfort food options, opened in December 2009. I'm guessing there was another restaurant here prior, but I haven't found that out for sure. The building dates to 1895 (or possibly 1919, depending on which Internet source I believe. Sigh....) and was formerly....

....I'm not sure. Barlow's is located at 241 A Street, and is part of the Channel Center complex, which includes some former Boston Wharf Company warehouses that date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At first I thought this place was an old fire house, based on the medallion pictured above with an old water pumper and the letters "F.I. Co." After searching through an online database of former Boston fire stations and scanning digital maps for any evidence and coming up empty, I put the question to Facebook.

And Mark Zuckerberg's cash machine didn't let me down. Answers ranged from, speaking about the medallion, "That's pretty clearly a prototype of Johnny 5 from 'Short Circuit,'" to "Contact the Boston Fire Historical Society and ask them," to the eventual winner: "The image looks like an old firefighting hand pump car. And I am guessing F.I. Co. stands for Fire Insurance Company. So the medallion may be the logo of an old fire insurance company that was located in the Boston Wharf complex."

So perhaps this building was offices for the adjacent warehouse complex, or a warehouse itself. The same person who deduced that the medallion was for a fire insurance company, managed to find a photo of the same type of medallion on a different building, and passed along that it belonged to the Fireman's Insurance Co. of Baltimore. I then learned from Wikipedia that back in the day, insurance companies had their own fire brigades, and would install these plaques on the buildings of their insured clients.

I love how much I can learn while researching online and reaching out to friends....

In addition to restaurants, start-up companies, architect firms and other businesses, this area is home to dozens of artists who live and work at Midway Studios.

The building in the above photo is one of the few in this area that don't appear to have been remodeled anytime in the recent past. I'm not sure if this is an artist space, or simply vacant.

Below is one final mystery of this old industrial area.

This short stretch of old railroad tracks extends about 20 feet south from Barlow's Restaurant, stops at the edge of the short Mount Washington Way, then continues for another 20 feet on the other side, ending at the building you see above. A quick look at historic maps of this area shows tracks to the east, which are still there, but nothing along A Street. So perhaps when the old Boston Wharf buildings were redeveloped into the Channel Center, this small link to the past was added. Just a guess.