Bakery part 1

 A new block is up here today, the newest print and the latest in my Too Soon No More series.   This piece is based on my photograph of the well known sign outside the Belmar store (their flagship location) of Freedman's Bakery.  Like all images in this series, the business goes back to the 1950's (even earlier in the case of Vesuvio) but was something I still patronized into the 21st century, and is now gone.  At one point there were smaller stores located in various area beach towns that carried the name and products, but I assume that everything was made at the large Belmar facility.  Those satellite stores are long gone as well, replaced by other bakeries or other businesses.  The Belmar location remained for quite a while, and I used to get breakfast there (a pork roll, egg, and cheese sandwich on a kaiser roll) on days when I dropped my truck off for servicing at the Chevrolet dealer across the street.  

It almost disappeared sooner.  A while back a design/architecture firm had come up with a plan to redo much of Belmar's Main Street, but had two conditions.  One was the ability to build a new location for themselves in the Belmar plaza (I think they got the permission) and the other was to have the Freedman's Bakery building condemned, so they could put something else there.  Problem was, that the person who makes that decision refused to condemn the building.  It was a going business and if the new team wanted it, they had to pay market price.  I guess that was not acceptable, because that design team took off without doing anything, and the decision was made to develop Belmar piecemeal as things came up.  

But I guess the bakery business is not what it was, and it turned out there were some issues with the building, so a while back it was sold and mostly torn down, including a mural on the back of it.  And the town lost another long established landmark.  That Main Street sign was very well known- at least a third of the old photos I found online featured it. It's a classic example of 1950's Googie signage, the kind of thing that would get your attention when it was built, and it remained up until the building was torn down.  (a brewery/brew pub exists there now) The sign itself went to the Belmar Arts Council, which raffled off the "Freedman's" part of it as a fundraiser, and the "BAKERY" letters saved for an unstated future purpose.

I took a photo (above) of the sign (bakery still in operation) as part of research for an old (2010) boardwalk print.  I started by copying that photo (this less cropped version) in pencil on a sketchbook page, cut a piece of wood to the proper size, and decided to set it aside for a while and work on the most recent boardwalk print instead.  But that's now done, so it's time to do this bakery piece.  A few days ago I got a mirror and started copying that sketch onto a piece of birch plywood.  Brought everything home again to compare it to that photo again.  I was home yesterday, so I did that, making adjustments to that paper sketch.  Today I used that updated paper sketch to fix the issues I had on the block.  I think it's ready to start cutting now.  The drawn block can be seen below:

This piece will be colored, so not much black will be in this one.  The colors will match the ones in my original photo, so not much needs to be done on my part, except the drawing, and cutting.  That's why I had to get the drawing right today, as it's the one thing I have to go on as I cut it.

For music today I went with an old favorite from my jazz/blues book, a home burned copy of the Miles Davis album 'Round About Midnight, a 1957 release that seemed appropriate to my subject today.  I've mentioned this on the blog before, but the best write-up is back in August of 2019.  The disc played perfectly well there in the Studio, from start to finish.  About the time it ended, I was done drawing.