The De Luxe Pie Company

This sign in Garden Alley is all that's left of the old De Luxe Pie Company.  Garden Alley is a cul-de-sac of carriage houses directly behind Madison Avenue where the bakery was located during the mid 1900s.

Signs Revealed

Renovations on a storefront along Central Avenue reveal a set of vintage signs.

The Olympic

The neon is long gone, the painted letters are fading, and there's no signs of life in the business downstairs. I'm not sure when the Olympic Bar closed. A quick search shows it was at least still open in 1990 when it was robbed by a knife-wielding man. I don't think I even noticed the place - or, more accurately - its worn sign - until 2005 or so when it caught my eye on the way to the Albany bus station down the street.

Ice & Fuel

Old metal sign on the wall of the old City Ice & Fuel Company at the corner of Park Avenue and Swan Street. I've previously written about an unwelcome "additive" of sorts that was found in ice from this facility decades ago in a post about the building's distinctive red tubes.

Vintage Sign

A fading tin sign on a weathered old carriage house in a cul-de-sac off of Dove Street. The sign announces the availability of General Electric tubes, along with repair services. I wonder if the tubes inside my old Philco radio came from here....

Bella Napoli on Beaver Street

I often use the Times Union Center's enclosed walkway as a shortcut between downtown and the Empire State Plaza (and recommend avoiding the walkway's elevators...they're scary, grimy and the smell is incredibly nightmarish).

When the Center - first called the Knickerbocker Arena and then the Pepsi Arena - was built, entire blocks of Albany's earliest streets and many old buildings were demolished to make way for the new construction. Not quite on the scale of the demolition that preceded the building of the nearby Empire State Plaza, but still a loss to historic preservation.

This block of Beaver Street west of South Pearl Street survived, but became essentially a narrow alley running along the north side of the Times Union Center.

This boarded-up building and its vintage sign stand out for me whenever I use the walkway. Maybe it's because I always liked the phrase "cocktail lounge." Even though I'm not much of a cocktail aficionado, there's some sort of retro elegance to the words. And maybe because it shares the name of a favorite bakery, Bella Napoli out in Latham.

This restaurant was founded in 1916 and remained in the same family for many, many decades. It survived the demolition of the surrounding neighborhood in the 1980s and continued to operate at least through the mid-90s. I'm not sure what year it closed or exactly why, but it's hard to imagine keeping a restaurant profitable in a such an obscured location.

I never actually dined at Bella Napoli, but I rather wish I had since I've come across a few rave reviews for some of their seafood dishes.

New York Auto

I'll have to count this sign as yet another detail of my neighborhood that I never noticed before. I've passed it so many times while walking down lower Madison Avenue near the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and the former "Little Italy" area of Albany.

When I was very young, we even got our old car's heater fixed here at least once or twice (and I still miss that 66 Caprice, heater problems aside). And the business is still open, though under a different name.

But the wonderful vintage sign - now very faded and corroded almost to the point of illegibility - never caught my eye before.

Ladies Entrance

I like this sign. It's shabby, rusty, and points to a narrow alley next to a bar called The Library Lounge. Its lights are long gone, with only holes marking where the neon tubes would've been attached. Still, it had a certain seedy retro charm to it.

The sign clearly predates the current bar, but I don't know what used to be here.

It's also a bit similar to a sign in working condition on the South End Tavern in Troy which once used to distinguish the entrance to the restaurant from the one to the less-ladylike bar.