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Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural that was vandalized with graffiti recently. The mural, a downtown fixture, has been on the side of the Verkamp Building on the corner of Aspen Avenue and San Francisco Street since 1938.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural that was vandalized recently. The mural, a downtown fixture, has been on the side of the Verkamp Building on the corner of Aspen Avenue and San Francisco Street since 1938.
Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream advertisement.
Local artist Emma Gardner has been perched on scaffolding for the last few days, carefully working to restore a piece of Flagstaff history along Aspen Avenue.
What she’s doing is part chemistry, part art. It requires her to travel back in time in research, and harness her love of history.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream advertisement that was vandalized recently.
Just a few weeks ago, the porous bricks Gardner's brush travels over were tagged in teal, black and white spray paint. The letters "KERP" obscured the Mission Ice Cream advertisement that’s been a part of the scenery downtown since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president.
Parker May was recently arrested at the post office on WC Riles Street, where police say he was trying to remove his sweatshirt and shoes after leading officers on a foot chase through downtown Flagstaff. When he was booked in the Coconino County Detention Facility, three cans of spray paint were entered into evidence -- in teal, black and white.
According to police reports, May told officers he was inspired to tag the sign by videos he’d seen on the internet. A woman, Tanya Bahe, was also taken into custody on Sunday, July 17, for filming May’s work.
Witnesses told Flagstaff police officers they had seen a man in a black hoodie and red shoes jump onto a newspaper dispenser and paint over the Mission sign. One woman, identified in police reports as Wildine Rodriguez, told officers she tried to protect the sign, going so far as to grab the graffiti painter’s leg and asking him to stop.
When police arrived, they said the suspect fled the scene. Once detained, he was booked for resisting arrest and criminal damage -- both misdemeanors.
According to one officer’s account, May offered to clean up the damage.
The problem with that? Cleaning up antique brick is delicate work, and bricks have always meant a lot to Shirley Westbrook, the building’s owner.
“My husband and I rented the building next door, the old Daily Sun building, and opened a gym sometime in the late 1960s. That was our introduction to the corner,” Westbrook said.
Westbrook added: “When they tore down the green stamp store across the street ... I went and scavenged a bunch of old bricks and brought them across the street and took them to my house.”
Here she pauses to laugh a little at the memory.
“I’ve never used them," she continued, "but it’s a lot of fun, a lot of changes that are pretty important for people to be able to tie back to in a short amount of time.”
For her, the history of the building is a valuable thing. At one time, it housed the Elk’s club. Then it was home to a drug store. Originally the wall was one layer of brick thick, but with time and renovations, a second layer was added. That second layer of bricks, Westbrook explained, were painted blue, white, and gold by Jack Fuss in 1938 (the year she was born)—encouraging passerby to grab a frozen treat.
“I’m always talking about bricks,” Westbrook joked, but just as there’s more than one layer of brick forming the building’s façade, there’s more paint under the original sign than first meets the eye.
“It’s really interesting because there’s so many layers of ghost signs under the sign. I don’t want to cover anything up because I want it to still tell that story, but we need to restore what got tagged,” Gardner said.
Somewhere under the ice cream ad is a layer of red paint, according to a story Westbrook retold. She learned it from Jim Beard, who owned the building before she did.
“He was very upset when they put the sign on the building because they had redone the face of it. The new brick was bright and he loved it. He had an agreement that nobody would paint any signs on it,” Westbrook said. “He had a little fiery temper, so he came up and painted it out with red paint. So it had already been defaced ... that was the story I received from him.”
The building was most recently tagged a little after 11 p.m. on Saturday, July 16. Westbrook was asleep. The next day, she left to visit her daughter, and she didn’t discover the damage until sometime later. When she first saw the tag, Westbrook was taken aback.
“It was kind of colorful … on the side of a railroad car it might be alright,” she said.
Still she was not inclined to leave the new paint up. Westbrook had a history of defending the sign. She said she was approached years ago by a downtown mover and shaker who wanted to update the look of the historic building.
“He wanted to put a mural over that … of a sunrise and all kinds of things, but I said, 'No.' It can’t be painted over. It must stay as Mr. Beard left it,” she said.
But she was ultimately facing a decision to either paint over or repair the vintage ad.
“Well, I’ve got two choices," she recalled thinking. "I can either paint over it and we end up with a big black nothing. ... I can’t afford to put a new picture up there, or we can try and see if we can restore it.”
A friend of Westbrook’s estimated to police that the repairs would cost more than $2,500. That same friend introduced her to Gardner to help start the restoration process.
Where Gardner worked in the August sunshine, bicycle wheels halted, and steps slowed. Some stopped to watch her work, tracing the brush strokes made by Fuss all those years ago. People thank her, because the ice cream advertisement splashed over brick on the building that now houses Lux Coffee and Mountain Sports means a little something different to everyone.
“People have walked by and said, ‘Oh, we take our family photos there every year with all the kids and everything.’ Of course, a bunch of photographers use it all the time as a backdrop,” Gardner said.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural that was vandalized recently.
She leaned on photos for reference, primarily one that was taken in the 1980s. Ever the diligent researcher, Gardner was still searching for older images.
“The ‘frozen’ letters I couldn’t really tell what they looked like, and I put it out on Facebook. I was like, ‘Hey, does anybody have any old pictures of this sign?’ Someone who contacted me grew up in the '70s when this was the drug store that was on the sign. He said, ‘Thank you so much for restoring that sign. It means a lot to me and my family because we grew up there in that store.’ Keeping that history alive? He really appreciated that,” she said.
Gardner, who’s been in Flagstaff for more than 25 years, mentioned other ghost signs around town that she would like to restore, given the community’s reception of her current project.
“They’ve faded. Like ghosts. They’ve just hung around and lurked. I guess that’s the reason they call them that,” Westbrook said.
She said she’s seen Flagstaff change a lot over the years. Now she hopes some things will remain to reconnect visitors and locals with the town’s past.
When asked what inspired her most to repair the ghost sign on her building she replied with a gleam in her eye, “Remembrances of signs like that in Albuquerque in my youth.”
“It’s interesting how Shirley getting me to restore this little sign has made so many people come out and go, ‘Oh, I love that sign!’ We need more of that. Just appreciating downtown Flagstaff. Instead of complaining about parking,” Gardner laughed. “I do think those signs are really fun and they’re a part of history, and I think it would be really great if there was an in initiative to kind of half restore or stabilize more of them.”
As she continues the rigorous job of restoring the Fuss sign, the local artist has worked hard to preserve its integrity and history -- warts and all.
“I can kind of piece together what the colors probably were. ... I’ve gotten a bunch of pictures of [Fuss’] work through the historical society. Just to see what his feeling was, what he did in general, stuff like that. The owner thought with one of the letters, ‘They must have restored this wrong.’ And I was like, ‘No, just sometimes his perspective was off.’ Because he was working really close and doing it all and sometimes it’s hard. If you don’t step back every 30 minutes you’re not going to know. If you’re on scaffolding it’ll be like, ‘Oops, that one was really narrow.’ So I’m keeping mistakes that he already made.”
Gardner was searching for more reference photos as she continued her work.
“It’s really hard for me to look through the layers and figure it out and piece it together. If anyone has any old pictures I would appreciate if they send them to me. Old pictures before 1985,” she said.
Any photos of the building at the corner of San Francisco Street and Aspen, Avenue can be emailed to spirleyes@gmail.com to help with the restoration project.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural.
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Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural that was vandalized with graffiti recently. The mural, a downtown fixture, has been on the side of the Verkamp Building on the corner of Aspen Avenue and San Francisco Street since 1938.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural that was vandalized recently.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural that was vandalized recently. The mural, a downtown fixture, has been on the side of the Verkamp Building on the corner of Aspen Avenue and San Francisco Street since 1938.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream advertisement that was vandalized recently.
Flagstaff artist Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream mural.
Emma Gardener is working to restore the historic Mission Ice Cream advertisement.
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