What’s up with that?

Q Why does the building at Wabash Avenue and Van Buren Street sport an ad for “Pago Pago: Cantonese food, exotic drinks in a Polynesian atmosphere”? There’s nary a moai stone head to be found.

A “There’s lots of old signs like that in cities,” explains local writer James Teitelbaum, whose Tiki Road Trip (Santa Monica Press, $16.95) profiles faux-Polynesian joints around the world. “The signs are still there because no one has a financial incentive to take them down.” Island-themed Cantonese eateries were once common in the States, Teitelbaum says. “When tiki restaurants gained popularity in the ’50s, Chinese food was still considered exotic. It was easy for Asian families to offer their own home cooking, slap a few tikis up and call it Polynesian,” he says. Teitelbaum attempted to investigate Pago Pago’s backstory and says the original owners are lost to history. In 1995, when he visited one of the chain’s three locations, at 316 South Wabash, he instead found a bland, smoky tavern. “The only artifact of its past,” he says, “was a bamboo awning over the bar.” The fading mural itself could soon be history; its building (421 S Wabash Ave), once a photo studio, may soon be demolished for a Roosevelt University high-rise, says the school’s rep Lesley Slavitt. Teitelbaum says he’ll miss the ad if it goes: “Every time I go by that sign on the El, it makes me smile.”

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