Signage

This is what East Broadway in downtown Columbia looked like 40 years ago, shortly before the canopy went up. There were no regulations or even guidelines governing signage. What you don’t see are the alleys strewn with overhead wires, but that’s another point of—thankfully—vanished ugliness.

No one can challenge characterizing the overbearing Lee Optical sign at the northeast corner of 10th and Broadway as a dark spot of signage, though we might have a yen for the ridiculously low price a pair of spectacles fetched in 1967. At the time, our Broadway was just another version of a thousand other Main Streets hither and yon with very few things to distinguish the area.

The first serious regulation of signage appeared in 1972, followed by the subsequent banishment of overhanging displays and animated signs, while paintings on the sides of buildings—some of them historic—were ordered covered. Columbia seems to have fared well enough with these regulations, though now the community is being called upon to enact more regulations governing Special Business District signage that, as their main point, further reduce a sign’s display area.

Just because I enjoy picking a fight from time to time, I wonder what’s wrong with signage standards the way they are. Or one can make the point for flexible guidelines depending on the area under consideration. Thus, signs on Broadway would hew to a different set of regulations than, say, those on 9th Street.

Whatever happens, I hope the discussion about signage moves city-wide into the realm of markers the city itself erects and maintains, starting with most ordinary street sign. The present flock of Lilliputian-size markers can be tough enough to spot, let alone read, even in broad daylight and generally don’t even tell us what street number block we’re on.

After building and maintaining the streets themselves, marking all city-owned roads and their intersections with large, easily read signs should take the highest priority. Here we should look to other communities that have outdistanced us, and Columbia should brazenly copy what they have done.

When pundits gather, some of the best talk is about which municipal squeaky wheel gets the grease while others are ignored. It is obvious there is little citywide concern about clearly marking the streets. As for establishing city-owned signs directing us to, say, the police station—now there’s something that’s probably still too revolutionary to even think about.