The Eagle Clothing sign in Brooklyn’s sulfuric Gowanus neighborhood didn’t get the love and attention of the famed Kentile sign. Not by a mile. It was smaller, set further back from the highway, lower to the ground, and certainly less photographed (and silk-screened)… but it beat the hell out of Kentile in sheer design.

Its olive green and poppy red color scheme was vintage 1967. Or so I tell myself. The globe motif behind “HOME OF” echoed the chest-thumping American pride of other Earth-appropriating logos like RKO Pictures, Sherwin Williams Paints and even the Daily Planet. Yeah…. Superman’s paper and Eagle freaking Clothes, man. On top of the WORLD.

I liked the sign so much (it was only a couple blocks from my studio at the Brooklyn Artists Gym) that I painted it.

Not wanting to crack anyone over the skull with the whole design (and to make use of a tall, thin canvas I’d already bought), I cropped it close, right down the middle. Got the all-important globe (which really makes the sign) and a few choice letters below. All you needed was a little with this sign. “AGL.” Always leave ’em wanting more. Then again, maybe I should have given more; the painting is still for sale and hanging in my living room as I write this.

Anyway, the Brooklyn Booms chugs ever forward, out of the coal age and into the condo age. The Eagle sign came down yesterday to allow the building to expand skyward. Tally ho. Hey ho let’s go. Up, up and awaaaaayyyyy…!

But the good news is project manager David Pollock is going to try to incorporate the sign into the renovation somehow. Hey, the man appreciates its splendor (from an article by Leslie Albrecht in DNAinfo):

“My first reaction [to the sign] was, what a piece of art,” Pollock said. “The size, the proportion – someone really spent some time putting this together. That’s why I’ll do everything in my power to make sure we maintain the past and incorporate parts of the sign into the building.”

Good man, David Pollock! I doff my chapeau to you. This is what they did with the killer old Pepsi sign in Queens (bottling plant went condo) and will do with the Domino Sugar sign in Williamsburg (sugar plant goes condo). I’d like to see more old signs worked into new-building design. The recent bummer on my block is that the classic Long Island Restaurant sign was unceremoniously ripped off the building this year to ready the place for a makeover. Into what? Probably a trendy Brooklyn eatery called something like “Munch” or “Brine” or maybe, if we’re lucky, “P. J. O’Pootershoot’s.”