For anyone wondering what they can expect to see when they take one of Matt Cohen's tours, well, the writing is on the wall.

It's all over the walls of The Exchange District to be precise.

Cohen is in his second summer of leading the Ghost Sign Walking Tour where he highlights the area's fading promotional signage and the companies that called these warehouses home.

"You know there are signs in The Exchange District, but you kind of just go by them every day without giving them a second thought," Cohen said. "But if you take an hour and half and see 50 or 60 of them, hear the stories about them, you get an appreciation for The Exchange District, our city and how we grew."

The 90-minute tours are run as fundraisers for the Advertising Association of Winnipeg and Heritage Winnipeg, both non-profit organizations. Cohen is a board member of the AAW and the tour originated out of a project he did for the association's 70th anniversary in 2014.

"I decided to see what they did with cataloguing the signs with The Exchange District and realized nobody had actually done that work before," he said. "I initially thought there were maybe 20 or 30, but at the end of the research there was closer to 150 in The Exchange District."

Cohen looked over archival photos of street scenes where he would notice partial signs on walls in the backgrounds.

"Then you would pull up Google street view and there was nothing there," he said. "But if you go in person you can see the faint outline of a letter or two.

"It's a labour of love. It's a lot of work, but really rewarding trying to find all these signs."

The earliest signs are black and white, dating back from the 1890s to the 1920s, coinciding with Winnipeg's boom. By the 1930s the signs started adding colour, Cohen said.

"Remis Sign Company was a big one in Winnipeg at the time," he said, adding most signs are identified by a company name in a bottom corner. "Because of the influx of our population at the time we had one of the highest concentration of sign painters at the turn of the century in Winnipeg."

Cohen's favourite is the huge can of hickory smoked ham at 185 Bannatyne Ave., and he enjoys hamming it up as part of his tour.

"There is a bit of a show and tell, because I'm collecting the actual products that are featured on the walls," Cohen said. "I have a can of canned ham, a bottle of stomach powder (Wilder's Stomach Powder, 52 Albert St.), a whole host of products I bring along as I talk about those businesses and the signs as we go by them."

Signs in The Exchange District are protected with a heritage status as they are considered designing elements of the buildings, Cohen said. He estimated there are another 200 signs downtown, the West End or on Selkirk Avenue that wouldn't be protected.

Cohen enjoys the feedback he gets from people who will often contact him weeks after they've taken his tour.

"I hear from people who say 'now I can't stop seeing these things everywhere I go,' " he said. "I think that's pretty cool."

Cohen's next tour is on Sunday and his last of the summer is Aug. 28. For more details and tour schedules, go online to ghostsigns.ca.

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