In New York, a 50-Foot-Tall Sign Made From Other, Salvaged Signs

Tom Fruin: Can you please use your sign-made-of-signs technology to make quilts? Think how wonderful it'd be to nestle under a patchwork blanket of pizza, construction and grocery signs – like sleeping in the middle of Times Square, but without the rat bites.

The Brooklyn-based Fruin made this alluring marquee for the front of the new Wythe Hotel in one of the less-hipster-colonized corners of Williamsburg. The vertical H-O-T-E-L measures 50 by 8 feet and invites minutes of careful scrutiny. Among the rusty scraps the artist salvaged from dumpsters and streets around New York are signs for renting apartments, air-condition repair, a fire sprinkler-control valve and hand-painted images of delicious deli fruits. Front Street Pizza's sign wound up in the metal salad, as did a billboard for M. H. Dicker Party & Balloons Corp. If you look closely, you can even spot '90s-era graffiti from now-respectable artist Dan Witz.