City Hall Walls Get a Splash of Color With Food Truck Collage

Mayor Marty Walsh will soon have some new artwork to cover up the bland, grey, concrete walls in his office at City Hall.

Ed Sokoloff, a Newton resident and photographer with a penchant for tracking down restaurant signs and ice cream parlor logos, to create elaborate collages, just capped off his latest project which he dedicated specifically to Walsh. “We know that Mayor Walsh has been a strong supporter of the expansion of the city of Boston’s food truck program and we thought it would be fitting to make a gift of the first copy of this montage to the Mayor’s office,” said Sokoloff.

Sokoloff and his wife delivered the montage to Edith Murnane, director of the city’s Office of Food Initiatives. The collage is a collection of food trucks from around Boston.

In October of 2013, Sokoloff told Boston that he’s spent the last 13 years creating the massive pieces of art. Projects he has completed include a portrait of nearly every restaurant sign in the city, as well as every ice cream parlor sign in the state. He’s also done collages of eateries on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, each offering their own nostalgic snapshot of sections of Massachusetts.

The mural of ice cream parlor logos from around the state was donated to Children’s Hospital.

The 71-year-old retired lawyer said the food truck project for Walsh was very different from projects he’s done in the past, however. “This project has been much more difficult to do because of the mobility of the trucks. With regular brick and mortar restaurants, there is a reliability that when you get to the restaurant, it will always be there,” he said of his adventures trying to track down the mobile eateries. “With food trucks, on numerous occasions they were not at the scheduled locations when I arrived. Also with the trucks and carts, in most cases a picture was taken and used of the whole truck, which I believe adds an additional artistic dimension to the montage.”

Clearing out the long lines of hungry Bostonians so he could get a solo shot of the vehicles also proved difficult. “Sometimes you had a fraction of a second to take the picture in between one customer moving away from the widow and the next in line approaching the window,” he said.