Saturday, March 1, 2008

Welcome to Painted Bricks

This blog exists as a format to publish photo of buildings in Casper, Wyoming, although it is possible some other interesting buildings from around the state will be published here as well.

The concept here was to memorialize, originally on a website we never got around to, photographs of buildings here in town that still retained painted brick sides. These were once very common in nearly every American city, but over time, have fallen very much out of favor. Some such paintings can constitute real artwork, in and of themselves, but most of them simply amount to advertising of a certain distinct, historical, style.

As time goes on, these paintings fade, are painted over, or sandblasted away. Indeed, there are fewer of them now, than when we first thought of this idea about a year ago. Sometimes, even efforts to save the "historic appearance" of a building can destroy them, as the new owners sandblast them off to return the building to its "original look".

None of these signs amount to anything of great historic interest. But they are artifacts of another era, and we hope you enjoy them.

1 comment:

Sagebrusheq said...

Hello Marcus, Pat;

Thanks for the interesting photos. I'll keep my eyes open for you for other nice examples around the west. As sort of an oddity, in the town where I lived in Utah, Magna, a film company painted over one old sign, that was in good shape, with an ersatz version of their own devising that I guess they thought was more representative than the real thing.

Sandblasting can be a real problem not just for old signs but for the bricks too, which deteriorate much faster after they have been subjected to the process. I think more care is being taken now but unfortunately many historic buildings on the east coast were sandblasted in the 70's by redevelopment agencies whose goal seemed to be to make everything old look brand new, and vice versa.

Thanks again for the photos and preserving that bit of history.

Sandy Lewis