This Wall of Stickers is the Most Valued Part of this Philly Property

When I was in high school, my boyfriend and I decorated the newspaper office by hand — he was editor in chief, I was executive editor. We papered the walls with his impressive collection of famous newspaper pages. The office was not huge, but we covered every wall and shellac’d over it all. This was back when we didn’t worry about toxic fumes from paint, when schools were not locked down 24/7, or design guidelines dictated all decor, even in a landmark building built in 1856. The building had essentially been abandoned, probably because it could not meet current codes, but we still held some classes there and inhaled it’s history.

Elgin Academy is a private school in the Fox River Valley in northern Illinois, and we ruled the journalism universe there. We even dared to switch out one newspaper issue before it went to press after it was approved by the teacher/advisor. Naughty naughty. We both got in trouble, but nothing got in the way of a free press! The newspaper office and those walls became the coolest hang out on campus, symbolic of the two media freedom fighters who dared to swap out the front page and headline after Mr. York had approved it.  

Now that building, Old Main, built in 1856 as a school, houses the Elgin Area Historical Society Museum. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and the interiors have been refurbished. I wonder what happened to those newspaper walls.

Which is why I found this story in The Hard Times a hoot: 90 percent of the value in this Philadelphia punk bar’s property value is in this sticker collection on the bathroom walls. Not unlike our walls of newspaper front pages, someone covered everything in stickers, even the handicap handles on the wall. These  are truly vintage. Owner Gerald Flinn’s great-grandmother opened the place over 80 years ago, and people just started putting stickers up in the bathroom, “not a single sticker has ever been removed:”

The historic restroom is coated with vintage stickers and decals ranging from bands like The Clash and The Kinks, to politically-charged Shepard Fairey artwork, to wheatpaste fliers for a Michael Dukakis fundraiser.

“My grandmother went to her grave claiming there were even some original Avery labels back there,” added Flinn, referring to a type of self-adhesive label — considered by many to be the world’s first stickers — invented by R. Stanton Avery in 1935.