Tangible pieces of Edmonton’s past linger along its skyline and the city is stepping forward to try to save them.
Prior to billboards and digital signs, wall advertisements were the calling cards for businesses. Some in the downtown core are roughly a century old.
“If you think about maybe Edmonton a thousand years from now, and it’s covered in 200 feet of sand and somebody comes along and starts excavating… they find these signs,” said David Johnston, principal heritage planner at the City of Edmonton. “They’re kind of like Egyptian hieroglyphics, right?”
Johnston said the city is looking to launch its own inventory of ghost signs. Many of the ads have become worn by both weather and time. Their faded appearance cast a ghostly imprint, hence their nickname.
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There is an existing inventory of historic resources in Edmonton that is mainly focused on buildings. The intent is to add the ghost signs onto that.
“Some buildings are protected municipal historic resources and in those cases, we’ve identified the ghost signs on those buildings as protected components of that infrastructure,” Johnston said.
That means they cannot be removed or altered. Many other signs have no protection at all.
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Johnston said with high land values and plenty of development downtown, heritage can be a hard sell when approaching certain developers.
“If somebody wants to do something with them that might alter them or damage them, we can have a conversation with that owner to say, ‘Look, we’d be interested in helping somehow.’ Offer solutions to keep them, work around them. Whatever that happens to be.”
The individuals who painted the ads were known as “wall dogs.”
“The story is they were probably not paid very well,” Johnston said. “They were kind of chained or roped to the buildings and they couldn’t leave until the wall was done and so they were like dogs chained up in a backyard.”
He said they hope to start the project by the end of this year.
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