The colorful ghost ad that brings to life a long-defunct New York appliance chain

Before Best Buy, before Circuit City, before the Wiz, and even before Crazy Eddie’s, there was Friendly Frost.

Never heard of Friendly Frost? I hadn’t either. Then I saw this wonderful two-story faded ad, which is still advertising appliance brands that no longer exist on the side of a graffiti-covered red brick warehouse at Fifth Avenue and 19th Street in Brooklyn.

I’m not sure when Friendly Frost got its start. But by 1951 the chain was operating seven stores in New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area.

Friendly Frost outlets popped up at 89-58 165th Street in Jamaica, Queens, on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island, in the Bronx on Fordham Road and Grand Concourse, and on 86th Street and Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge (hence the sign’s location).

Demand must have been strong in mid-20th century New York City for “television sets,” refrigerators, air conditioners, and “stereophonic music systems,” as the company called them in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s, Friendly Frost expanded to 39 stores.

There’s something about top appliance chains that lead them to go belly up, and that’s what happened to Friendly Frost. A 1979 New York Times article noted that the chain had been “operating at a loss in recent years.”

Friendly Frost stops showing up in newspaper archives by the early 1980s. When the last outlet shut its doors I don’t know. But left behind is this stunning postwar relic of a building ad, a remnant of the company’s retail glory days.

[Photos: J. Sears]