Coca-Cola pg 1 9-29-22
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Serendipity Plays a Role
Coca-Cola mural will be less 'ghostly'
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
PUTNAM — Starting this week the Coca-Cola mural on the Bradley Playhouse brick wall will go from “ghost sign” to a vibrant shining star of the Putnam skyline.
Sheila Frost, co-owner of the Courthouse Bar and Grille and former Putnam Business Association coordinator, said they’ve told their employees not to park their vehicles in the alley behind the restaurant. That alley is home to the ghost sign. Lifts for artists to work will be moving in to restore the mural.
Jennifer Brytowski, producer of Jennerate LLC which is behind the project, said the team of hand letterers estimated that it would take them three to five days to completely restore the mural to Coca-Cola specs. “We’ve got some talent behind this,” Brytowski said.
“It all felt like the right time.”
Brytowski happened to be talking to Frost about the mural and Frost said, “Let’s re-approach this. It’s a good time to resurrect this.”
After decades of less-than-successful inquiries for funding to restore the ghost sign, Frost said, as it happened, the family of her husband James Frost’s roommate from UConn happened to be connected to the Coca-Cola Company. They happened to be talking to him and happened to mention the ghost sign. The former roommate told them, as it happened, that Coca-Cola was looking to restore its ghost signs.
The grant from Coca-Cola, after negotiations, is $10,000 and the Putnam Area Foundation kicked in the remaining $5,000 for the $15,000 budget for the project. And if the work starts this week, it will make the hoped-for goal of being finished by the Great Pumpkin Festival Oct. 15.
Frost said this project means a lot to her personally. It took a lot of networking and connecting with the right people. “Personally, I knew the right contacts.”
“We needed to embrace this. We’re refurbishing history.”
The restoration of the ghost sign has been on the radar for the Putnam Business Association for a long time. Former PBA coordinator Chris Coderre, years ago, had worked on the idea. The restoration idea has popped up regularly in the ensuing years and it was the PBA spearheading it this time when it all fell into place.
More than 100 years ago The Coca-Cola Company and its local bottlers “painted” America with a broad brush stroke of “ghost signs.” As many as 16,000 of the huge Coca-Cola wall murals caused one producer to boast that a “motion picture could not be made anywhere in America without capturing the image of a Coca-Cola wall mural advertisement.”
The first Coca-Cola sign was done in 1894 in Gainesville, Ga., and she believes the Putnam ghost sign was created around 1905.
Coca-Cola has very specific guidelines for colors, designs, etc. Brytowski said that Coca-Cola is sending information on the correct colors to be used and “pounce patterns” which are like stencils. Those will ensure that the words being painted are absolutely correct, sharp and authentic. The original colors, according to Frost, were vibrant.
Brytowski added a “great group of hand letterers” have been assembled and they are “really invested in the original,” staying true to Coca-Cola’s guidelines. The letterers will use lifts and a permit for the work is already granted.
Also excited is The Coca-Cola Company which is planning to bring its “hug machine” to the Great Pumpkin Festival for the reveal of the restored mural. Brytowski said the machine gives you a Coke when you give it a hug.
Originally plans included power washing and a seal against graffiti. But the power washing idea was scrubbed. “We don’t want to lose what’s there,” Brytowski said. And because the sign is so high up on the wall a graffiti seal should not be necessary.
She said a restoration has been attempted before as “you can see the pattern of the letters ‘moved over’,” (slightly overlapped).
Said Frost: “This will be the shining star on Putnam’s skyline, on Putnam.”
caption:
Restoration of the Coca-Cola "ghost sign" slated to begin soon. Linda Lemmon photo.