71Kestner's, Since 1914
Painted facade sign, KESTNER’S · Kestner’s Department Store, 501 Elm Avenue · sign painter not on record · Ike Kestner opened a bank and grocery store in the 500 block in 1914, the date on the wall, though nothing dates the lettering itself · the older ghost sign surviving on the brick below is unidentified too · know who lettered it? Tell us.SIGN
Two painted signs on one building, and the older one has almost finished disappearing.
Look up. The whole upper storey of this brick building is painted butter-yellow, with KESTNER'S in tall black slab capitals across it, since in a modest little script, and 1914. A row of narrow round-arched openings runs behind the lettering — a few still glazed and dark, most bricked up flush and painted over as though they had never been windows at all.
The good part is underneath. Where the yellow paint stops, bare brick starts, and on that brick is a much older advertisement that has been weathering since before anybody now living walked down this street. Most of it is gone. What survives, if you stand at the right angle in the right light, is a fragment on the right-hand side: AFTER EVERY MEAL. Those three words at that scale in that era almost always meant chewing gum, and every Waco kid who ever read them has been dead for years.
Two signs, one wall. One of them announces the year it started. The other has almost finished ending.