Big picture, a Stay store would feature a mural

The blank wall on an abandoned building could be a muralist’s canvas.

On a lark, on the first Friday in August I drove to an old abandoned building in Hummelstown and walked around the exterior of it.

I want itinerant Stay Apparel Co. to have a permanent home. This particular building has been idle for years. I don’t know what the owner plans to do with it, nor am I clear whether retail would be a permitted use under the borough’s zoning.

But there’s no harm in imagining what could be, and this building has the gritty, authentic charm that only decades-old buildings possess. Trees are overgrown, paint is faded, bricks are falling from one corner. All fixable.

And just around that corner, in the back, I found a large wall that would accommodate one of the specific amenities that the Stay store of my dreams would offer: a mural.

Perform a headstand

I was not schooled in art. I’m more of an art appreciator than an art lover. I even had to look up the definition of a mural, which, according to Wikipedia, “is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate.”

Murals can come in all manner of size, complexity and purpose: to add beauty, celebrate history, instill community pride, inspire creativity.

In Hershey, our hometown, Troegs Independent Brewing celebrates some of the local ingredients that go into its beers with a massive mural on its east wall measuring 120 feet by 30 feet.

Stumpy’s Hatchet House in Hershey has its crossed-hatchet logo painted on interior walls. It was created by Chelsea Foster of Tetra Design Co. in York, who also painted the script “York” mural in the Collusion Tapworks parking lot in York.

Back in the 1990s, when I was a reporter for the York Daily Record, I chronicled the making of the “Murals of York” program, which focused on local history. It was inspired by the murals in the former logging community of Chemainus, British Columbia, which bills itself as the “world’s leading community-driven art tourism experience.” Meanwhile, Philadelphia is known as the “Mural Capital of the World,” with more than 4,400 of them.

Murals don’t get any simpler than one on the side of Jo’s Coffee on South Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas. Spray-painted in red on a green wall, it reads, “i love you so much.”

Speaking of the Long Star State’s capital city, I once saw a man perform a headstand while taking a selfie in front of the “Greetings from Austin” postcard mural.

That’s the power of a cool or compelling mural.

Sense of place

Exactly what a Stay store mural would comprise, I do not know. But as a brand that celebrates Pennsylvania and a sense of place, there’s a clear starting point for designs.

Since we launched Stay in 2017, we’ve barnstormed across south-central Pennsylvania and then some — State College and Bellefonte, for instance, and Lewisburg and Bucks County this year. From city streets to a river bridge, baseball stadium to hockey rink, farm markets to shopping malls, indoors and outside — we’ve been everywhere, man, for hundreds of pop-up appearances.

There’s beauty in a group of makers setting up somewhere for part of a day, like the circus come to town. But a six-foot table, or even two, under a 10-foot-by-10-foot tent doesn’t allow us to tell stories adequately or to offer the range of Made in USA products we’d like to provide.

Stay needs a permanent home.

I’m not naive about the challenges of brick-and-mortar stores, but I also know what a barren wasteland most retail shopping has become.

To keep customers coming back, there has to be an experience. We have lots of ideas about how to achieve that, most of which you’ll have to wait and see when that great Stay store finally opens.

Just know that there would be a mural, and you’d definitely want to take a photo next to it. The headstand would be at your discretion.