Works in progress: "Good for somethin': A Twitter Tale"

     Writing for publication is hard. I sometimes forget that, because writing for publication is about all I do. But this Saturday feature, Works in Progress reminds me. Even professional writers can have a tough time with it — I had a pal whom I asked to write a single sentence about a current project. Just one; I'd fill in the rest. The pal phoned me, genuinely panicked, stuck. Couldn't get a handle on it. I of course replied there was no need. But it was surprising. Then again, I've always had the gift of facileness. Or maybe the curse.

     So it didn't surprise me when the Saturday "Works in Progress" spot began to go unfilled. Until this week, when there were two offerings — it never rains, it pours. One, from a fiction writer, went into the weeds over a comment on the Tylenol killings column, and I decided the matter had been aired enough. 
     But this, by perennial reader Jakash, I'm happy to share. "Jakash" isn't his real name; he asked if I could preserve the fig leaf of anonymity. It IS daunting, to hang your identity out there — another reality that often flies past me. Sure, I said, why not? Take it away, Jakash:

     Almost exactly a year ago, my wife and I were taking a casual Saturday stroll through one of the non-descript parts of Lakeview in Chicago. As we walked south on Ravenswood, we noticed workers on scaffolding taking the siding off a building near Addison. Crossing to the south side of the street, by Dunkin Donuts, we turned back to see that an old advertisement was being revealed as the siding was pulled off: "Ward's Soft Bun Bread," certainly unfamiliar to us. My wife took a photo of the partially uncovered sign, and we figured we'd come back later to see more.
     Everybody knows that Twitter has its problems. More so since having been picked up at the bargain price of $44 billion by that emerald-encrusted champion of free speech, Elon Musk. (It was recently characterized by our genial host in the Sun-Times as "a toxic hellscape run poorly by a right-wing South African egomaniac..." Personally, I never signed up for it, since a) I realized that it would be a huge time sink and b) I'm not really what you'd call a joiner. 

     However, enough people I respect are on it that I've haphazardly sought out maybe a dozen  accounts. Looking at just those is also a time sink, of course, but not to the extent of becoming the time drain it could if I were actually participating.
     At any rate, many of the folks I follow are local history, architecture, infrastructure or nature-minded Tweeters who are frequently posting interesting ephemera or more significant news about under-reported goings-on in the city. I knew from them that the sign we'd seen was a ghost sign, i.e., a sign painted on a building that used to advertise something which has either been blocked from view by a newer building, or covered up by renovations. 

     "The ghost sign people are gonna love this!" I thought. 

      Since the corner of Addison and Ravenswood is not exactly in an uncharted wilderness, I figured I'd be seeing tweets about it soon. So, I waited, checking my usual suspects each day, pretty sure that if anybody posted photos of this sign, they would go viral, at least among the select group of like-minded Chicagoans. 

      We saw the workers on Saturday morning, July 9. By Tuesday evening, still nothing to indicate that the building had been discovered. I felt people were missing a treat, and figured I had 3 options: a) keep waiting. b) Join Twitter and post about the sign myself. Or c) pick somebody that I followed and hope that he'd visit the location and put it on his timeline, to then be seen by others. 

      I went with the third option. That night I decided to email Robert Loerzel, a journalist and photographer whom I consider the King of Local Twitter (editor's note: he is correct. Robert Loerzel is indeed the King of Local Twitter). He has over 20,000 followers and maintains a very robust and interesting timeline, thriving in the midst of the hellscape.

     I was pretty sure he'd be interested in this sign. Alas, for whatever reason, he didn't jump at the chance to visit the site and I went back to waiting for somebody else to stumble upon it.
     By the following Sunday, still nothing about this building. I couldn't believe it. Especially since we'd gone back and there were a number of other ghost signs now uncovered on the north side of the building. I knew from looking at his interesting Twitter account that Bill Savage, a professor at Northwestern and a lover of local historical minutiae (and literature) (and baseball) (and bicycling) (and...) (editor's note: and hot dogs, and editor of my Chicago memoir) sometimes rode his bike on Damen Ave., which is two blocks away from Ravenswood. I thought perhaps he might make a slight detour sometime if he was riding by to see the signs. So I emailed four photos to him, specifying the location. 

     That worked. Within hours, he had stopped by, taken several of his own photos (much better than ours) and posted the news of these ghost signs to Twitter.
     And from there, it was off to the races. They were quite popular, among the people who find something like that appealing. Bill's tweet went viral in a low-key, non-Obama version of viral. (No doubt assisted in this regard by being retweeted by Robert Loerzel...) The signs were reported about and photographed by Colin Boyle on the news website Block Club Chicago and even made the TV news. Many folks took their own pictures and posted them. We had thought the building would most likely be torn down within a week. But the signs stayed up for over a month. People who are interested in preserving such historic material got involved and proceeded to painstakingly remove them. "Local experts dated the ads to the late 1920s and early ’30s," Colin Boyle wrote on Block Club. "They were painted directly onto wood panels as opposed to the common practice of painting onto brick, adding to their rarity.
     The moral of this tale is that Twitter contains multitudes. It's not just a free-fire zone for anybody with a wacky conspiracy theory to promote. There are a lot of folks who use it as the most efficient way to broadly share information. Though currently I don't even look at it, because Elon Musk, flashing his galaxy-brained brilliance, has decided that you must sign up in order to browse tweets now. And pay, if you want to enjoy certain features of the site. He's talked in the past about his wish for it to be a virtual town square, but doesn't seem to recognize the disconnect when it comes to his desire that people should pay one of the richest men on Earth in order to step onto the village green.
     Anyway, it was quite enjoyable for my wife and me to see what happened once this discovery became better known, and the signs ended up in good hands. As for the "Wards Soft Bun Bread" sign that we originally glimpsed? It's now in the possession of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/07/19/rare-decades-old-ghost-signs-revealed-on-ravenswood-building-facing-demolition/
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/08/12/rare-lakeview-ghost-signs-saved-just-days-before-demolition-thanks-to-donations/