An early 1900s laundry detergent ad comes back into view on East 72nd Street
It’s the upside of urban redevelopment: when old and unloved buildings meet the wrecking ball, sometimes a long-concealed faded ad comes back into view.
This has happened at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and 72nd Street. On the side of a still-standing tenement inside a walled-off construction site are the remnants of a full-color ad for a very 19th century-sounding soap brand.
Much of the ad has been painted over. But enough remains to decipher the product, which happened to be manufactured in Manhattan.
“James Pyle’s Pearline Washing Compound,” the first part of the ad says. “The Great Invention,” it continues.
The rest of the ad is hard to read, but it may say “for saving toil and expense without injury to the texture, color, or hands—as vintage print ads (below, about 1910) for the product state.
Larger letters against a blue background read “Pearline: Best by Test.”
So what was Pearline? Apparently it was detergent for washing clothes, and its appearance on store shelves coincided with the beginnings of advertising and marketing.
“Pearline soap began appearing as a product around 1877, was trademarked on November 21, 1899, and continued to be active use well after the rights to the name was purchased by Procter & Gamble around 1912,” states the Hagley Library’s Digital Archives.
According to the Faded Ad Blog, James Pyle manufactured Pearline first at 350 Washington Street in the 1850s, then at 414 Washington Street (now a very pricey Tribeca condo loft residence). A 1903 issue of Soap Gazette and Perfumer reported That Pyle was moving his soap factory to Edgewater, New Jersey.
How long will the Pearline ad be visible from the street? It depends on the pace of construction at this prime piece of Upper East Side real estate.
Whatever replaces it (a 21-story residential tower, according to New York Yimby), you can bet this piece of ephemera—which tells us a little about how laundry was done in an era before machines—will be concealed from view once again.
[Thanks to Ephemeral reader Johnny Jets for alerting me to this find!]
