Glossary
Ghost sign
A faded, hand-painted advertisement surviving on the brick of an older building, a remnant of early-twentieth-century signwriting that many cities now document and value as heritage.
Ghost signs occupy an odd category: commercial speech that outlived its commerce and became beloved. They're increasingly inventoried alongside murals in cultural asset maps, and they anchor some of the best walking-tour content a city has, because every sign carries a story about what the street used to sell.
The preservation debate is genuinely unsettled: repaint them to legibility, or conserve the fade as-is? For many enthusiasts the patina is the point. A freshly repainted ghost sign is, by definition, no longer a ghost.