The Wall Dogs of Toronto
By Jeremy Hopkin
edited by Dylan Reid
It was a fading yet still striking giant ad for pianos that first got me interested in ghost signs and the “wall dogs” who painted them.
As a kid growing up in Scarborough, I was somewhat isolated from the city life that existed west of the Don Valley. My friends and I knew there were cool and interesting places to be discovered downtown, but we were too young to travel there on our own.
But once my high school years began in the 1990s, I started to venture out from the suburbs with friends to visit the core of Toronto. It was exciting and frightening at the same time.
Predictably, my first trips downtown were to the legendary Yonge Street strip. It wasn’t quite the grand spectacle that I’d been told it was, but we still managed to have a fun time at the comic book shops, arcades, and music stores that remained abundant there.
Continuing my journey along Yonge Street, my head was perpetually cranked upward, my eyes studying the ornate architectural details on the older buildings, which were the ones I considered to be the most interesting amid the concrete, steel, and glass of the newer ones.
I remember stopping in my tracks when a fading yet boldly painted sign somehow cut through all of the other sights, visually shouting HEINTZMAN PIANOS across the street to me from a wall above the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatre.
The Heintzman name was already familiar to me. Pianos used in many of the public-school functions I attended were manufactured by them, as were several in the homes of my relatives and my parents' friends. It once seemed to me that all pianos in the world were created by Heintzman & Co.
This sign made a bold statement, yet when I shifted my view to the storefront of the building that the sign was painted on, I felt a bit perplexed that there weren't any pianos for sale. It turned out that Heintzman had vacated the Yonge Street strip roughly 20 years prior to my stumbling upon the building. Yet, here their old wall sign was still doing its job advertising their wares; a ghost of the building’s past that didn’t realize that time had moved on.
These leftover ads on the outside walls of buildings that tout long-gone businesses are often called “ghost signs.” They evoke the past life of the street, and indeed this first experience of a ghost sign triggered my brain, pushing me to imagine how the area looked when Heintzman first moved there and had their first wall sign painted.
I later learned that happened in 1910. Following the turn of the last century, this portion of Yonge Street near Queen Street was an intensely popular spot for the sale of musical instruments, phonographs, and later radios. Many of Heintzman’s competitors, such as Nordheimer and Mason & Risch, were among the instrument retailers that located nearby to get in on the action.
Heintzman & Co. didn’t start off on Yonge Street. It began as a somewhat humble business on Duke Street, but quickly grew until the company moved to a larger location on King Street in the 1860s. After 50 years of service there, Heintzman chose to migrate over to Yonge Street. They left that spot over 60 years later, in 1971, but their famous pianos are still being produced today by a successor company.
The Heintzman ghost sign also started me thinking about the life and work of the sign painters who first put it there. In my mind’s eye, I began to create a silent movie, re-enacting a scene of the location as it must have appeared back in the day, with a sign painter up on a large swing stage in front of the wall, painting to his heart’s content. Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ may have even snuck into my imaginings a couple of times and almost unknowingly sabotaged that painter’s work.
These mural painters were often called “Walldogs.” Painting large advertisements and signage such as this directly onto the brick walls of buildings was a distinct branch of the sign writing profession that gained prominence in North America during the latter part of the 19th century. It raised public advertising to an entirely new level: their enormous scale, sharp contrast and bright colours lorded over the sightlines within cities and towns in a way that had never been seen before.
The paint that sign painters used to create this type of wall sign was quite durable (in part because it was toxic). It stood the test of time, often outlasting the businesses who commissioned its use. Unfortunately the wall sign on the south side of the Heintzman Building that I noticed back in the 1990s is no longer visible today, as it had since been covered over with modern paint. But the result could be that this ghost sign gains an extension to its longevity, thanks to remaining hidden and protected until the newer paint wears away. Unless, that is, the surface is chemically stripped during a renovation.
Thinking of the Heintzman sign painters reminded me of a family friend named Bill Miller. Throughout the 1980s and 90s my Dad would take me to visit Bill and his wife at their apartment in Scarborough. Since I loved drawing and painting from an early age, I was fascinated by the artistic abilities Bill demonstrated while decorating his model railway locomotives.
Later I learned that Bill was far more than just an artistic hobbyist – he had been gainfully employed as a sign painter throughout his entire working career. I was surprised to discover someone could have a full-time career in sign painting that made enough money to support a family for decades.
Bill had started his sign-painting trade in the 1930s for the White Rose gasoline company, painting advertising campaigns on fences, signage, and billboards surrounding their gasoline stations. He eventually moved on to the Canadian Pacific Railway and spent the rest of his career there, stenciling and hand-painting lettering onto all of their rolling stock and any other equipment that required lettering.
Throughout his retirement years, Bill had a love for railways and as a result became a volunteer with the Ontario Rail foundation, a railway heritage organization with which my dad also volunteered. Bill’s talent as a sign painter did not go to waste, and he once again plied his trade on the sides of antique steam locomotives and passenger cars that would pull many happy people on excursions throughout Ontario. I remember seeing Bill working away on the lettering of a steam locomotive; for me, it was somewhat hypnotizing to watch, and I learned quite a lot about traditional sign painting techniques.
Bill has since passed on, but the memories of him and some of the fruits of his labour remain. Part of Ontario Rail has since evolved into a tourist line which still operates today as the South Simcoe Railway in Tottenham, Ontario.
The core skills of the profession of sign writing and sign painting had been long established by the time Bill Miller started his career in the 1930s. Unfortunately for those employed in the trade, major advancements in print technology would eventually bring it and many other established graphic professions to an abrupt end.
Like Bill, many sign painters were gainfully employed within the art departments of large companies, but many of them joined up with sign painting or marketing companies. In Toronto, one of the best known of these establishments was E.L. Ruddy Co. Ltd., which eventually became a division of Claude Neon Ltd.
It took a skilled and steady hand to be a sign painter. To be successful, their artistic talent had to work in conjunction with practical knowledge of masonry surface preparation, paint mixing, and bookkeeping. Accurately calculating the costs involved to quote the job to potential clients was essential. Estimating the cost of a wall sign was partially based on counting bricks. Often a quick sketch of the design to be painted on the wall was created beforehand to help envision the final product.
Courses to learn all aspects of the signwriting trade could be taken at trade colleges, and/or it could be apprenticed through hands-on training that was passed down over generations. The ability to reproduce a wide variety of lettering fonts off the top of their heads was essential for sign painters, a skill that was eventually gained through the practice of repeatedly drawing complete alphabets and numerals on paper.
Budding sign painters would usually start off their careers by purchasing a sign painting kit from a popular supplier through a mail order catalogue. As time passed, they would build up their collection so that it became a library of tools of the trade, including brushes, ponce wheels, chalk lines, and other such items. Many wall sign painters will hold a baton against a painting’s surface with their non-painting hand as a spot to rest their painting hand, to prevent it from smearing paint.
If the wall to be painted was in somewhat poor condition, it was necessary to prepare it for painting; the quality of the preparation and the quality of paints varied, depending on the price that the client was willing to spend. If an unpainted wall wasn’t in the best shape for painting, it was popular to first treat it with a weak muriatic acid that slightly roughened the surface to better accept paint. Lime milk (water-diluted lime), and bolted whiting (extremely fine chalk) were also frequently used to ready the surface for paint.
A scaffold or swing stage would first be assembled in front of the wall to be painted, depending on how large or high the wall painting was to be. Once a platform was in place, the paper sketch of the design would be transcribed onto the wall in a roughly painted outline, a process that sign painters called “breaking on.”
Safety at heights wasn’t as big of a priority as it is today. Many of the irons on the stages and scaffolds did come equipped with “safety” back loops, in which a piece of 2x4 could be slipped in as a backboard to prevent the painter from falling off. This safety feature wasn’t as effective as it was made out to be. There was little to no use of safety harnesses or fall arresters in the early days, and as a result some sign painters met an untimely end on the job site.
Apart from heights, another workplace danger lurked that wasn’t a common concern of the past: as a cost-saving effort, most sign painters made their own paints that combined boiled oil, turpentine, dryers – and an enormous amount of lead.
In a sense, sign painters were alchemists of their trade, transmuting that lead not into gold but rather into a rainbow of colours. To create their paint colours, they mixed minerals, oxides, and a cornucopia of other materials. Examples included green vitriol (copper sulphate) to make a cheap green colour, and lime milk from calcining limestone to create a yellowish colour.
Little was reported on the health and well-being of sign painters, so there is no solid evidence that lead poisoning played a part in their demise, but it’s quite likely. The afflictions caused by lead poisoning among traditional artists started to be recognized in the early 1800s, known as “Painter’s Colic” or “Saturnism.” Artistic fame was tainted by the high costs of poor health and early death.
The craft and trade of sign painting also all but disappeared in the 1970s (along with lead paint, banned by governments), to be supplanted by new printing technologies. Many of the painted signs themselves have also been lost – faded away, built over, or cleaned off in renovations.
But more recently, those ghost signs that remain have received greater appreciation, and a desire to learn the old craft of sign painting has resurfaced. It has gained some respect and become its own form of high art.
Ghost signs, which had all but faded from the walls they were painted on 100 years ago, are being restored or completely repainted as a tribute to the original signage, retaining an important part of the overall visual character and history of the older buildings they were painted on.
Some contemporary painting companies honour the traditions of the original sign painters but most use modern technologies to help them achieve their goals. Apart from creating new signage, from time to time they’re called upon to restore ghost signs to their original appearance. When the former factory complex of the Brunswick Balke Collender Co. in the Liberty Village area was renovated into condominiums and retail space, a point was made to repaint some of the ghost signs that once covered several of the walls between the windows of the building.
“The Sign Painting Company,” a contemporary business that started off in the UK but is now based in Toronto, has made a point of carrying on the legacy of traditional sign painters and sign writers. In November of 2020 they took on the large task of repainting a deteriorating ghost sign on the west wall of the former Gelber Bros. building at the corner of Richmond St. W. and Duncan St.
“MuralForm” is another Toronto based painting company that delved into ghost sign renovation and were tasked with highlighting the ghost signs of Scythes & Co. and the T.A. Lytle Co., both of which once occupied the warehouse building at 128 Sterling Rd.
The longevity of many of the original ghost signs has been astounding up until this point in time, and their weathered look is a much-loved feature. But those that have survived will soon fade into oblivion without some form of restoration or renovation. It’s also a fact that the repaints will need more maintenance than their predecessors since lead is no longer a part of the paints used.
In a few cases, Toronto ghost signs have been thoughtfully retained inside renovated buildings, for example: “The Burroughes” event venue in the former F.C. Burroughes Furniture Co. building at 639 Queen St. W.; a partial sign for Keller & Co. inside the Dineen building at 140 Yonge St.; and part of what appears to have been a painted wall ad for Coca-Cola that reveals the name of the company that painted it, inside the aptly named “E.L.Ruddy Co. Café” at 1369 Dundas St. W.
The ephemeral and vulnerable nature of ghost signs make them especially important to me. Through them, the skill of the sign painters and the names of their defunct clients speak out across time in an almost supernatural experience that connects them directly to the eyes of the living. It makes me believe they should be cherished and preserved when possible.
Although ghost signs now enjoy some appreciation, these unique voices from the past are still being unceremoniously erased in Toronto. While I was writing this piece, I happened to drive by the site of a long-admired 1940s ghost sign for Buckingham Cigarettes on 306 Davenport Road, only to discover that it had been leveled to make way for a new condo.
Hopefully what remains of Toronto’s ghost signs will be recognized and retained as an important feature of the city’s built heritage. I’d like to believe that some kid 100 years in the future will also have the ability to have the same connection with the past as I did by seeing that old sign on Yonge Street.
Wall Dogs of Toronto, by Jeremy Hopkins
Moderators: matt, kurtkraler, glyn