The Kohlbeck & Sons Fine Tailors Mural

This wall dates itself. Tucked into the corner of the composition, in small letters under the sponsor line, it says JUNE 2007. Everything above it is painted to look fifty years older: Frank Kohlbeck & Sons, Estab. 1876. Men’s all-wool suits, $15. Quality tailors. Clothes. 221 Steele Street. Tel. 99.

A two-digit phone number

Every detail in the lettering is a period fact doing its job. A telephone number you could say in two digits places the ad in the early exchange era. Fifteen dollars for an all-wool suit places it before the mid-century. And the establishment date is real: Frank Kohlbeck opened his tailor shop in 1876, and the business stayed in the Kohlbeck family for five generations, closing only in 2001, six years before this mural went up. The Kohlbeck Building that housed the shop from 1884 still stands on Steele Street; in 1907 the business expanded into the former bank building next door, which also spent decades housing the town’s newspapers, the Ahnapee Record and the Algoma Record-Herald.

The wall was sponsored by the Norb Kohlbeck family. A family sponsoring the painted memory of its own five-generation business is the Walldog Wave’s whole idea in miniature.

Who painted it

The project leading artist was Cameron Bortz of Pawcatuck, Connecticut, the farthest-traveled crew lead at the meet: when the 2018 Door County Pulse feature says Walldogs came “from as far away as Connecticut,” it means Bortz. The Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure lists the wall as entry G in the lettered mural key.

The Walldog Wave

Over three days, June 21 to 23, 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs, the international guild of mural and sign painters who keep the old hand-lettering craft alive, painted ten murals on historic downtown Algoma buildings. The event was conceived through the Algoma Main Street Program’s preservation work and coordinated by local Walldog Dave Petri. This register documents every wall in the set.

If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether)
• Door County Pulse: A Community’s Vision, the Murals of Algoma (2018)
• The mural itself (establishment date, address, and June 2007 date line are painted on the wall)