This Time, The Famous One

Seven years ago, I wrote a blog post called “No, Not The Famous One.” Guess what?

On a site visit to Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday, I noticed a lot of nice cast-iron storefronts in the old shopping streets. Given that iron wasn’t a major industry there in the nineteenth century and that the big New York foundries shipped cast iron all over, I was curious if any of what I was seeing came from here. Then I walked past the Blind Tiger pub

and found this:

A lot of paint is making that hard to read, but the “New York” is clear as day. Looking at it closely, it’s “J. L. Jackson something something New York.” That’s an early name for what was later the Jackson Architectural Iron Works, which was a big deal in nineteenth-century New York and worked on a fair number of early skyscrapers. And an early shop building for Jackson was at 55-65 Goerck Street* on the Lower East Side and the middle line of blurred text, the second something, sure looks like it might read “55 to 65 Goerck St.”

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* Goerck Street doesn’t exist any more.