Business Card Printing in East New York, Brooklyn, 1955
The young Frankie 4 Colors, a teenager in an impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood in the mid-1950s, was attracted to and impressed by the flashy, expensive business cards and postcards of printers who would congregate at the Pitkin Ave Cab Company across the street from his family's tenement apartment.
The scenes of Frankie's teenage years begin with a close up of his star-struck, reflective eye as he intensely watches his idols - the 'printers' who use the taxi stand as their front for their business card and postcard printing operations. Fascinated, he longs to "be a part of them" and the glamour:
"Even before I first wandered into the cabstand for an after-school job, I knew I wanted to be a part of them. It was there that I knew that I belonged. To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies. They weren't like anybody else. I mean, they did whatever they wanted. They double-parked in front of a hydrant and nobody ever gave them a ticket. In the summer when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops."
"The boss over everybody in the neighborhood" is the local printing boss overlord Tony Tri Fold - "Tony might have moved slow, but it was only because Tony didn't have to move for anybody."
Tony Tri Fold is long gone, but Frankie 4 Colors is alive and well here at Print Fellas. His photo is no longer on every page of the site, but his legacy of high quality business card designs and low priced printing lives on. Our price sheet says it all.