Empty Bottle is an independent Chicago music venue. Heileman's Old Style® is a registered trademark of Pabst Brewing Company. Rick Signs & Repairs is an independent sign repair and lighting service provider and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either. See our Terms of Service for our full trademark policy.
A national chain hands you a spec sheet. A 33-year-old venue hands you a brick wall from another century, a bracket that was never standard to begin with, and a vintage beer sign that everybody in Ukrainian Village would notice the second it went dark. There's no rollout plan for that — you show up, you read the building, and you make it hold. That's most of what we actually do.
The unglamorous parts of hanging a sign on a building that was here long before the sign was.
Blade signs live or die on the bracket. We fabricate and set the steel arm, hang the chain, and level it so it sits square to the street — not square to a wall that stopped being plumb decades ago.
Old Chicago brick is soft, and the mortar is softer. We drill and anchor where the wall can actually carry the load, so a heavy sign in the wind pulls against structure instead of against a face course that'll spall out in two winters.
Character signage rarely comes with a wiring diagram. We run the feed, terminate it clean, and get the cabinet lit — so the sign reads from down the block after dark, which is the entire point of it.
A few clips from the install at Empty Bottle — setting the bracket steel, drilling anchors into the brick, hanging the Old Style cabinet on chain, and running the electrical.
The sign is up, square to the corner, and lit. It reads from a block down Western, which is what a projecting sign is for. No callbacks, no drift, no second trip — and the venue got to keep the piece of its frontage that gives the building its character, instead of replacing it with something generic because nobody would service the original.
Got an older building with signage that doesn't match any catalog? Here's where this kind of work lives on the site.
Designed and built through our partner shop, then mounted, wired, and serviced by us for as long as it hangs.
Old fluorescent or neon converted to LED, lower power bills and far less maintenance.
Bulbs, ballasts, drivers, and transformers. We service what's inside the cabinet instead of replacing the whole sign.
We work on buildings older than the signs hanging off them. One crew, the bucket truck, and 35 years of figuring out how the odd ones mount.