Berenice Abbott's 1937 photograph of Centre Market Place Frank Lava's storefront, February 4, 1937. This Berenice Abbott photograph shows the gun-shaped sign of a gunsmith storefront which had been in business since 1850. A number of gun shops once lined Centre Market Place, and were the appropriate neighbors of the massive Police Headquarters housed across the street in the grand Beaux-Arts building at 240 Centre Street. Lava was the third generation owner of a gunsmith shop established in 1850; he continued to manage the shop into the 1960s.

Storefront signage is a ubiquitous feature on New York City streets. Today, signs can barely seem worth noticing, the well-known fonts and logos blending into the scenery. But when the streets of New York were lined with mom and pop shops, the design of signs (through fonts, images, and use of space) often allowed these individual stores to stand out. The diversity of signage is especially eye-catching in historical photographs.

6 Centre Market Place ca. 1937 The shop on the small alley of Centre Market Place had belonged to gunsmiths since the 1850s. Its oversized shop sign was an age-old form of European advertising, originally devised for illiterate patrons and still useful on the multi-lingual Lower East Side. The ornate French Baroque police headquarters was built across the street in 1909 for the then-staggering cost of $1.5 million, and stood as a potent symbol of the rule of law. One of Abbott’s photographs of the shop offers a straightforward description of the storefront, similar to Atget’s Parisian views. A second photograph, with the camera pointed up from beneath the sign, transforms the gun from a symbol of a craftsman’s trade into a surrealist found object or a political joke. The shop remains a gunsmith, although the sign is gone. In the 1970s, a new police headquarters was built near the Municipal Building. The old headquarters is now a landmarked luxury condominium called The Police Building, home to artists and celebrities.