Gilty Pleasure

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About Gilty Pleasure

This pool is about the once ubiquitous but slowly disappearing gold leaf / gilt lettering names of apartment buildings and other gilt lettering building & business names.

It's to preserve & share the fascinating range of calligraphic treatments, the attention to architecture in the way the lettering is placed, the fanciful and often historically interesting names, the remembrance of a more elegant age..

I like them all for different reasons - I especially like thinking, "if I was going to name a building..." it's always food for thought. Why are some well-preserved, but others not? Why are there so many buildings I see that look like they used to have names that are now nameless?

As the gilt becomes damaged, many owners will simply scrape off the remnants and put up vinyl street numbers. If there's a renovation where the glass is changed, the building name isn't redone in gilt. Signage is updated ... and so it goes.

Collect them while you can, they're disappearing!