Something that stood out to me in photos of Pittsburgh street scenes in the 1930s and 1940 is the number of billboards on roads and buildings. There were dozens on Carson Street in what I call the Terminal and West End scenes. Most of them had the same basic wood construction, usually painted green. I’ve seen photos of a different design, painted white, but the green ones were more common.
View looking northward at the Erie Street crossing, showing Tube City Beer, billboard advertisements for Iron City Beer and Fairmont's Better Butter, a service station and several houses. A police officer directs traffic near the crossing. Signs point the directions from the crossing to Glassport, Route 51, Route 30, Versailles and East McKeesport.
I found plans for scratch-building this type of billboard using scale lumber, in an article titled “Highway billboards from the 1930s and ’40s” by Stanley Reynolds in the August 1989 issue of Model Railroader magazine. In another issue (I’ve lost track of which one), the magazine provided copies of vintage billboard graphics, which I printed on my crappy old inkjet printer. Future billboards (I’ll need a lot more) will be printed on my new color laser printer, which prints in higher quality.
I assembled one of my first billboards without its support structure and mounted it to the side of Building 2, the derelict storefront. These first two billboards were built and painted over a few days each, in June 2020.
