| Edification value |  |
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| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? |  |
| Time spent | 78 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | For me, the most meaningful sign at the Sign Museum was a folding-fan-shaped one for a defunct Lower East Side tattoo parlor called New York Adorned. Back in 2008, New York Adorned is where I got my one and so-far only tattoo. These serendipitous encounters, bumping into old acquaintances in unexpected places, are quintessentially New York, and I love when they happen.
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Who cares about old signs? Like, old business signs, denoting stores, bars, restaurants, law firms, churches. Back in the day, they were hand painted, to a set of rules and customs and standards, or actually multiple different sets of rules and customs and standards depending on where one got one’s signs from. Usually they were neighborhood-centric. New York had bunches of sign makers, and the vernacular sign design here differed significantly from Philly signs, Boston signs, Chicago signs.
But, I confess, when I learned that the New York Sign Museum existed, I wondered who might care about such things. I mean, I care about them. But I love the quirks of New York City, and I’m a crazy museum completist. When I signed up for a tour and subwayed out to Bushwick, I expected that it’d be just me and the docent.
Au contraire. 20+ people turned up, on a random Friday afternoon, to learn something about the history of shop signs in New York. I suppose it’s only appropriate that a museum devoted to a form of advertising would turn out to have an excellent social media game. And it also helps that it’s earned some significant recent media coverage.
I saw the sign
The New York Sign Museum resides within one of New York’s new generation of artisan sign shops. Noble Signs was founded in 2013 by a graphic designer and a fabricator. As they created signs for new businesses, they kept finding old signs that nobody had bothered to remove. And, as the current owners of buildings and businesses generally had no use for the old signs, they were happy to have the Noble guys take them off their hands. Thus was born a collection, and where collecting and passion and expertise coincide, a museum will sometimes follow. As it did here, when the New York Sign Museum was born in 2019.
Like a good New York streetscape, the Sign Museum is a bit chaotic. You can only visit on a guided tour. That’s just as well, since when I visited only one sign (a neon one for a toy store) had accompanying wall text. The tour gives visitors an overview of the types of signs you’re likely to encounter on New York City streets, the craftspeople who created them in the past, and the kinds of work that Noble does today.
What’s on view at the Sign Museum
My tour opened on the workshop floor of Noble Signs, where an array of signs hangs on walls and suspended from the ceiling, over the tables and benches where active signmaking happens (except when tours are going on). The tour covered a variety of signs and the principles of sign creation, and the pragmatic approach to lettering to (usually) maximize readability and simplify language for a easily distracted and often self-absorbed New Yorkers.
The tour then headed upstairs, where signs fill a couple of dedicated exhibit spaces as well as the Noble Signs business office.
The tour covered major sign types, including:
- Blade signs (the ones that hang out perpendicular to the storefront, easy to view from the sidewalk), now illegal in New York City.
- Porcelain signs, with powdered glass fused to steel. Indestructible, unless you drill holes in them.
- Vacuum signs, which mold plastic into three dimensional shapes for both strength and visual interest.
- And of course neon…
The collection includes several great neon signs, and I learned something about the arcane alchemical arts of creating neon colors. Some colors just don’t exist anymore, the recipes lost to time. The sign for Queen restaurant, an Italian place in Brooklyn Heights that closed in 2020 (after 66 years!) is outstanding.
Signs as civic culture
The Sign Museum tour is also a tour of New York efficiency, pragmatism, and thriftiness, traits that extend all the way back to New Amsterdam. New York businesses often left old signs up. They just covered them with new signs, and/or repainted old business names with new ones. Some signs reveal palimpsests that trace the history of a storefront over years or decades.
It’s also very clear from the signs on view that in New York decorative branding usually takes a backseat to the simple words that describe what a storefront offers. “SHOES” “PORK” “LAWYER” — that sort of thing. New York signmakers optimized for short attention spans. It’s funny to think contemporary TikTokers have something in common with such an old-school and analog medium.
Sign history also traces neighborhood history. Our guide spent quite a while dissecting the design imperatives that shaped the sign for L&G Meat Market, which was a local Bushwick shop. Then he casually pointed out the bullet hole in the letter “A” in “MEAT,” which never got repaired, a relic of a more exciting time.
Signs of the times
It kind of warmed my heart that so many people were interested in old business signs. In this era where certain blocks of Broadway feel more like open-air shopping malls than Manhattan (oh, look, a Chipotle next to a Jamba Juice next to a Five Guys, across the street from a CVS next to a Panda Express, next to a Raising Cane’s…), the fact that people would schlep to Brooklyn to see signs from long-gone businesses speaks to a hunger for authenticity, uniqueness, even imperfection, that I love.
And the group engaged, people asked questions, they lingered.
The Sign Museum reminded me of a couple of other places. The Neon Museum in Las Vegas is an obvious sibling, though its open-air extravaganza of over-the-top casino signage from Vegas’s various heydays far exceeds what the Sign Museum can show in its shop. It also reminded me of one of my favorite New York City museums, Poster House. Both focus on often overlooked and typically ephemeral advertising media (though of course many people collect and study posters).
Should you visit the New York Sign Museum?
The Sign Museum’s current incarnation isn’t ideal. Having the Sign Museum reside in an active sign shop makes seeing the collection more of a challenge — the old signs have to give way for current projects. I did appreciate the tangible link from past to present. Seeing modern signs under construction, neon samplers, and the tools of the trade, keeps the collection from feeling like a relic of a lost past.
However, I came away wishing for more organization, better narrative flow, either in terms of chronology or borough or sign type or business type. To be sure, the tour was engaging. And there’s an argument that a mixed-up, idiosyncratic approach to displaying the signs replicates their natural habitat, back in the day. But more space would enable the Sign Museum to balance fun and education better.
That said, I am unequivocally in favor of supporting organizations that collect forgotten things, that elevate stories that might otherwise be overlooked, and that curate and conserve things that we’d otherwise lose. I felt an odd synchronicity that I visited the Sign Museum so soon after Amud Aish Memorial Museum.
Prosaic, efficient and taken for granted, business signs are a part of what made New York, New York. Once upon a time, small businesses dominated. You couldn’t just order a sign in your pick of 50 generic typefaces on the internet or at Staples Express. From that perspective, the New York Sign Museum tells a New York story as quintessential as the Museum of the City of New York, or City Reliquary, or Wyckoff House. Everyone who loves New York should go.
For Reference:
| Address | 2465 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn |
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| Website | nysignmuseum.org |
| Cost | General Admission: $25 weekdays, $30 weekends (tour reservation required) |
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