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Signs o’ the Times
Since 1999, technical writer Dave Till has maintained a sort-of-secret online shrine to Toronto’s forgotten industries. We say sort-of-secret because every couple of years a blog like Metafilter or a website like cbc.ca will discover it, and his server would take a tremendous hit.
So Till has moved his collection of images of old business signage—those faded, hand-painted signs advertising novelties and dry goods known as Ghost Signs— to Flickr.
Till, who grew up in North York, has lived all over Toronto. He knows its nooks and crannies well. Although he has always had an interested in taking pictures of “city things” (there are images in the Flickr set that date from the 1980s), he didn’t begin collecting Ghost Signs until “I first got a digital camera in 1999.” When he had accumulated enough of them, Till put them up on his personal website, accompanied with a short history of the business or date of the sign. People liked the marriage of words and pictures, so he “started going around trying to get as many as I could.”
As for favourites, Till has two. “One is Burnett Brothers Butchers [pictured above] on Danforth east of Woodbine,” he says. “It dates to exactly 1917.” The other is on the east wall of what used to be the Classic Theatre, at Gerrard east of Greenwood (now the Centre of Gravity Theatre rehearsal space). Till likes it because “there’s a whole lot of ads and things on it.”
Moving the pictures to Flickr has re-stirred Till’s interest in Toronto’s Ghost Signs and he has also added new images and histories. Some of the photos have become historical documents themselves as more than a few ads have since disappeared. “Usually, it’s because the building owner remodels the building, says Till. “Sometimes, people spray paint over them.” Not that he has anything against tags—Till also has a Flickr set documenting local graffiti.