Central Minnesota Photographer Brings Ghost Ads Back To Life

UNDATED (WJON News) -- You can take a fascinating journey through years gone by with an area photographer. Jay Grammond grew up in Grey Eagle and recently published his book "Fading Ads of the Twin Cities." The book chronicles ads painted on the sides of buildings, or Ghost Ads, from all around the Twin Cities Metro Area.

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Grammond says he got the idea during the pandemic and things just came together for him to do the book. He says he had a lot of fun adventures while making it:

"Going up on the roof of this building and climbing through there, I had to climb up on a table because the door out there was about four feet up off the floor and it was like a half-size door for some reason and so I had to get up on a little table to get up to the door and then jump through the door on to the surface on the other side which was another three feet down or whatever but I made it fine."

He says he enjoyed finding the different ads and bringing them back to life. You will see advertisements from Gold Medal, Schmitt Music, and Dahl Violin Shop to name a few. Grammond says it took about two years to capture all the ads and his son helped him along the way:

"My son had gone with me on the initial stages to help me find these signs and he put something out on Reddit, and I'm not active on it but I know what it is, but he put something out saying what we were doing and asked people to mention where they had seen signs so then we could kind of create a database of different signs that maybe I didn't know about cause there's a ton of them and it turned out that that was one of them that ended up in the book was this Dad's Rootbeer."

He says he especially enjoyed finding the old pop and beer ads like Coke-Cola, Orange Crush, and 7-Up. Grammond currently resides in Princeton.

He will be doing a presentation on "Fading Ads of the Twin Cities" on Friday at the Paynesville library at 10:30 a.m. and at the Belgrade library at 5:30 p.m. You can find out more information about Grammond or buy a copy of his book on his website jgrammondphotography.net.

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