Mystery sign, mystery location

[657 East Fordham Road, Bronx, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Roaming around the Bronx, I happened upon this address, three quarters of it in shadow. I wondered about the signage. Above the door: UNIFORMS. Above the first-floor windows: OF UNIFORMS. (HOUSE is likely what’s obscured.) But the sign in front of the second-story? The sunlight is just enough to turn it into a mystery.

[“LEADERS IN [what?] DRESS.” Click for a larger view.]

I’ve tried adjusting the contrast and sharpening the image, but no soap. LEADERS In [what?] DRESS: my best guess is HORSEMEN’S, but that’s only a guess. The symbols to the left are perfectly readable but a greater mystery. The P with the line through it resembles both the ruble sign and the staurogram. Perhaps it’s a personal brand of some sort.

What I didn’t realize when I found this address is that I had stumbled onto the future location of Faculty Memorial Hall, a building just off the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University, holding classrooms, offices, and (now) food. A Fordham chronology tells me that FMH was converted in 1966 from “a five-story commercial loft building.”

I was an undergrad and later a teaching assistant in FMH. I remember the long walk to the building, out from the campus to a small stretch of Belmont Avenue. I remember the coffee machine. I remember the narrow staircases, one up, one down. I remember smoking True cigarettes while teaching. I remember sitting in on Jim Doyle’s hours-long optional class to get through Four Quartets . I remember the Elvis Pretzel man, who stationed himself at the Belmont Avenue entrance to the building. That stretch of Belmont was and is a dead end, not traversable in Google Maps.

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