Murray Avenue Kosher Market: Sign Project, Summer 2014

For many years, as we have gone to Pittsburgh to visit our family, I had admired the hand lettered signs in the front windows of Murray Avenue Kosher. In 2013 the hand lettered signs on butcher paper had been replaced by 18 x 24″ black on white prints from Kinko’s down the street.

Lila Weiss, co-owner of the store had kept one of the old signs, and showed it to me. I could make the signs for their windows, as long as the letters were as fat as the previous signs (we have lots of older customers who need for the letters to be big.) Each Monday I would get the week’s specials, and work on anywhere from 24-38 signs to go up by midday on Friday, when the old signs went down, the windows were cleaned, and the new signs went up before sundown. The store reopened with the new specials on Sunday.