Vintage Sign Rocks the Casbah

Jan 17th, 2008 by Marilyn

Hanging stuff on the walls – your stuff, not just any old stuff – is clearly one of the last pieces of the new-home puzzle. It’s about making a place yours; embellishing the walls with your voice, softening the nooks and crannies and angles with the weight of your own treasures.

And that’s what we’ve been up to. We’re now down to the big ones, the ones that have been patiently leaning in crates and boxes against the wall, envious of settled furniture and waiting for their moment.

Now it’s here, and since we have an unswerving devotion to giant vintage signs, believe me – they carry a lot of weight in more ways than one.

Here, Dan and Greg size up where to hang one of our favorites, a huge metal sign for the “El Casbah” room in Kansas City. It was a birthday present for me years ago from Greg, though it was clearly the object of both our desires. My birthday provided a convenient excuse to make it ours.

The “El Casbah” room was a lively and well-known Kansas City nightclub of the 50′s and 60′s, in the long-gone Hotel Bellerive at Armour & Warwick. That’s Kansas City, Missour-ah.

It must have been wonderful to drink and dance and dress up there, when people did those things.

It was quite the thing to be seen at El Casbah.

When we first saw this, it was hanging in the window of a now-defunct antique shop in Ottawa, Kansas, between dusty mannequins and glass knick-knacks. We rescued it. It was the humane thing to do.

It has many rough and rusted holes, and they’re beautiful – that’s what you get for hanging around an exterior brick hotel wall for 30 years or more.

How many people walked or drove past this sign? How many gray-suited, hat-wearing, well-meaning men went home and asked their wives, “Honey, do you want to go out to the Casbah some night?”