TDC and Legacy of Letters are returning to Brooklyn for the first walk in the borough since 2015. This time the focus will be on a group of neighborhoods in the heart of Brooklyn bounded by Church Avenue, Ocean Parkway, King’s Highway, and Utica Avenue: Flatbush, Ditmas Park, East Flatbush, Ocean Parkway, and Flatlands. It is a very residential area so that the lettering we will see will include many apartment building names and addresses. But there will also be small businesses, churches and synagogues, public schools, Brooklyn College, and two cemeteries to provide some variety. The lettering will include a few examples of neon, some Art Deco, some Hebrew, lots of sans serif carved in stone as well as cast in metal, and a few funky hard-to-describe letters.

As with recent lettering walks we will finish with a meal or a drink at a neighborhood restaurant or bar.

Paul Shaw is a designer and a design historian. He has been leading lettering tours of New York City neighborhoods for 10 years and of other cities, both here and in Italy, since 1997. As a designer he specializes in letterforms from calligraphy to type design. Paul has designed or co-designed 18 fonts, including Kolo, Donatello and Old Claude. As a historian he has written or lectured about Bartolomeo Sanvito, W.A. Dwiggins, Oswald Cooper, Frederic W. Goudy, George Salter, Phil Gruskin, Hermann Zapf and others.

Meeting place and itinerary will be emailed a few days in advance of the tour.