In downtown Winnetka, I found a well-preserved coal chute. The building and chute date to the early twentieth century, probably between 1900 and 1930. The Majestic Company was founded in 1907 in Huntington, Indiana. It manufactured coal chutes, garbage receivers, package receivers, and fireplace dampers. Here is is an original […]

I saw this antique brass three-unit mailbox with old-fashioned speaking tubes and doorbells in an apartment building that was built in 1904 in the Ukrainian Village in Chicago. I’m guessing it was installed either when the building was built or no later than the 1920s. Currently there is a modern […]

Chicago has its share of ghost signs. Here a few from a couple neighborhoods on the north side of the city. The first one is an old ad for the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, which was based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Schlitz brewery was opened in 1858 and in 1902 […]

Baraboo, Wisconsin, was the headquarters and winter home of the famous Ringling Brothers circus. The Ringling Brothers held their first circus in 1884. In 1919 they merged with the Barnum & Bailey Circus and moved their winter headquarters to Connecticut. The old grounds and buildings are now a living museum […]

I took a day trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and found some pretty cool ghost signs in the Third Ward, a historic warehouse district.

Last spring a few of my friends found this fake multilayered ghost sign in Boulder, Colorado. It’s on the side of a bike shop. There seem to be three layers of signs, and even the bricks are fake – they are painted on. (Thank you Julie, Eric, and Andrew for […]

Due to historical reasons, there are very few Ukrainian-language ghost signs in Ukraine, but in the Ukrainian Village (a neighborhood on the north side of the city) in Chicago, there is one in Ukrainian, and it is possible that there had been more. The one that I found is for […]

Chernivtsi / Cernăuți / Czernowitz, located in south-western Ukraine near Romania, was a multicultural city that at various times had large populations of Romanians, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Russians, and Roma. Chernivtsi was the capital of the Bukovina region of the Austrian Empire. In 1918, it was annexed by the […]

Uzhhorod (Ungvár / Užhorod / Ungwar), a city in Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia Oblast of Ukraine), which is near the borders of Slovakia and Hungary, has a multicultural history. For a long time the region around Uzhhorod was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, later the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After WWI, it was […]

My sister recently visited a ghost town in Montana called Bannack. The town was founded in 1862 and was the site of a major gold discovery. Today sixty historic structures remain standing in the town. The last residents left in the 1970s. A ghost sign remains on the ghost hotel. […]