A tenement goes down, and a century-old chewing tobacco ad returns to the uptown cityscape

It was just another corner brownstone tenement. Empty and boarded up for years, its facade was marred by graffiti and a tattered Chinese restaurant awning hung across the ground floor. The time came to bulldoze the old building, which held court at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 116th Street. But once the site was cleared and the wall of a long-obscured neighboring tenement emerged, a gorgeous relic of turn-of-the-century New York City came back into glorious, full-color view. The cobalt blue, brown, and white ad is cut off, but it appears to read “Chew Virgin Leaf” and then “Manufactured by D.H. McAlpin & Co.” With its leaf image and old-timey lettering, it’s a gorgeously preserved reminder of the kind of painted building ads that used to cover commercial shopping streets like this one. Running from the FDR to Riverside Drive, 116th Street has long been a main business artery across Harlem. The chewing tobacco ad might have graced 116th Street before the 20th century, when…