A Sign of the Times; Starbucks Trumps Relic

By Barry Owens
POSTED SEPT. 1, 2006

The old, hand-painted advertisement on a building near the corner of Lispenard Street and Broadway, fading but still visible for blocks, is not technically a historical artifact, but it is certainly a relic from Tribeca’s industrial past.

“The Penn Textile Co.,” the sign reads in six-foot-tall, rust-colored letters on the side of the five-story building at 405 Broadway. “Open Sunday.”

Like so many other textile concerns in Tribeca, Penn Textile Co. vacated the neighborhood years ago (it has not welcomed a Sunday customer in more than 15 years). And like so many other former textile warehouses in the area, the building is being converted to condominiums.

That hand-painted sign will be converted as well, painted over with a 20-foot-by-20-foot, dark green Starbucks logo. The national coffee chain with the slick corporate graphic will likely be the building’s next ground-floor tenant.

“When?” asked Christy Daily, a Lispenard Street resident, who was alarmed to hear of the impending change as she walked her dog one morning last month. “That’s awful. This block was the one holdout in this neighborhood without a Starbucks sign staring us down.”

Renovation is already under way inside the building, built in 1854. Little will change on the building’s exterior besides the sign on the side and the storefront on the ground floor, according to the project’s architect, Joseph Lombardi. The building was last modified in 1908 and is part of the Tribeca East Historic District.

“It is not an historic sign,” Lombardi explained in July to the Landmarks Committee of Community Board 1, seeking approval for the project. “The guidelines allow it.”

Roger Byrom, the committee’s chairman, had a different take. “It’s crazy,” he said. “You shouldn’t be removing what is already there.”

The committee and the full community board, which makes recommendations to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, approved the overall project, but not the change to the wall painting. “We’re going to keep the sign,” Byrom said.
The commission does not have a policy of protecting signs, however. Even those on the walls of designated landmark buildings have been painted over in the past, a spokeswoman for the agency told the Trib. So when the proposal came before the commission last month, the new sign was given a pass.

“Maybe it could be a faded green,” suggested Commissioner Margery Perlmutter. “It’s a trademark, we would recognize it anyway.”

The commissioners were troubled by the size of a proposed rooftop addition and the extension of a parapet and asked the architect to return with a revised plan.
Back on the corner of Lispenard Street last month, Robert Michaels, an attorney, said he had taken little notice of the sign in the more than 10 years he has walked past it on his way to work in the office tower next door at 401 Broadway.

He said he had, however, noticed some of the tenants who had moved into the former textile shop in recent years—illegal vendors selling handbags, and, he suspected, prostitutes selling their services on an upper floor. “As for the sign, it doesn’t really knock me out,” he said. “It’s a bit of New York history, I guess. What I really wish they would do is paint over the graffiti on 401.”

Then came Tribeca-based artist Steve Powers, a sign aficionado who last year installed a work of retro signage in Coney Island. Surely he would have an opinion about a Starbucks logo replacing a fading piece of old Tribeca.

“I like the Penn Textile sign, but what are you gonna do, man?” he said. “I just hope it will be hand-painted,” he added about the logo. “And I hope they use a local guy.”