Signs in America's Auto Age: Signatures of Landscape and Place (American Land & Life)

257 Pages·2004·2.46 MB·English

by  John A. & Keith A. Jakle & Sculle

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signs in america’s auto age
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s igns
american land and life series
Edited by Wayne Franklin
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in America’s Auto Age
signatures
of landscape
and place
john a. jakle
and
keith a. sculle
foreword by
wayne franklin
University of Iowa Press
Iowa City
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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
Copyright © 2004 by the University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Richard Hendel
http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in
any form or by any means without permission in writing
from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken
to contact copyright holders of material used in this book.
The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrange-
ments with any whom it has not been possible to reach.
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs
are by the authors.
The publication of this book was generously supported
by the University of Iowa Foundation.
Printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Signs in America’s auto age: signatures of landscape
and place / by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle.
p. cm. — (American land and life series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-87745-889-8 (cloth), isbn 0-87745-890-1 (pbk.)
1. Signs and signboards—United States. 2. Advertising,
Outdoor—United States. 3. Social interaction—United
States. 4. Landscape—United States. 5. Cities and
towns—United States. I. Title. II. Series.
hf5841.j35 2004
659.13'42'0973—dc22 2003063364
04 05 06 07 08 c 5 4 3 2 1
04 05 06 07 08 p 5 4 3 2 1
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To Cindy and Tracey
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Contents
Foreword by Wayne Franklin, ix
Preface and Acknowledgments, xvii
Introduction, xxi
part one: commercial signs
1 Signs Downtown, 3
2 Signs on Main Street, 18
3 Roadside Signs, 32
part two: signing public places
4 Traffic Signs, 55
5 Signs and Community, 73
part three: signing personal space
6 Territorial Markers and Signs of Personal Identity, 95
part four: sign aesthetics
7 Signs and Landscape Visualization, 117
8 Sign Regulation, 144
Epilogue, 167
Notes, 171
Bibliography, 193
Index, 213
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Foreword Wayne Franklin
Signage so pervades the modern American scene that it is hard to imag-
ine how this landscape looked when the sign did not intervene between
eye and place. In fact, one has to go very far back in order to find the
“clean” landscape. Centuries before the insertion of the signboards and
traffic devices and other objects that interest landscape historians John
Jakle and Keith Sculle in the modern era, the European eye seemed to
crave some interposition of cultural signs where familiar objects were
all too literally few and far between. In his innovative historical novel
LaSalle, published in 1986, John Vernon gives to his doomed title char-
acter a chance to fantasize an overlay of French landscape on the rolling
grasslands of the new continent’s heart:
France must have been like this before the Romans came; the
Romans drove out the barbarians and became the Gauls, building
villages and farms in valleys such as this one. Gazing down at this
valley, I imagined hedgerows, walls, villages, footpaths, mills, fairs,
churches, commerce, sheep and cows at pasturage, cultivated fields,
estates and chateaus, all the appurtenances of a thriving civilization;
here a wedding feast, there some women washing clothes on a creek
bank; smoke rising from the blacksmith’s shop, and barges carry-
ing livestock down the river. Then all dissolved and rose like a mist;
the buffaloes returned, along with the unmowed grass and groves of
trees, and the entire valley unfurled like a very carpet, untrodden by
either coarse boots or slippers.
Vernon is right: the earliest descriptions of the American landscape by
European explorers and settlers soon become meditations on signs and
their absence from the new lands. When, beginning his famous history
Of Plymouth Plantation in 1630, William Bradford sought to recall what
Cape Cod had looked like on the arrival of his company a decade ear-
lier, he was at a loss for words. He could recover its original appearance
only by remembering the English landscapes the settlers had left and
then erasing from such older memories the signs of habitation that now
made his actually hostile homeland seem familiar, even welcoming, in
retrospect. The residue, what was left after all those erasures, was
America. In a formula that would long persist in American landscape
description, Bradford thus emphasized what the new place lacked: as