Year by year, more disappear: the quirky and colorful business signs of the 20th century that once littered the United States with their kitschy and eye-catching designs luring visitors to stores, restaurants, lounges, theaters, shopping centers, tourist attractions, and, of course, motels.
The synthesis of folk art tradition and cold-hard commercialism, these signs followed the growth of the American highway system, and were perhaps the most prominent symbols of the cynical and disposable culture of convenience and impulse that wholly consumed the United States in the 20th century.
The signs functioned as both advertisements and wayfinding tools, and could never be classified as high art: even in their prime, they were widely criticized as crass and unsightly markers to rampant consumerism and unfettered sprawl. Yet one era’s trash becomes another era’s treasure, and these signs attracted wider appreciation as their numbers began to dwindle.
Hand-painted, two-dimensional signs on the outer walls of buildings were a ubiquitous feature of the American landscape starting in the late 19th century, but by the 1920s, sign-making reached new heights and three-dimensional form with “sky signs”, now known as scaffold signs.
Often perched atop towering hotels or other tall buildings in city centers, these machine-produced signs were attached to steel scaffolding and lit by electricity, still a novelty in many places.
As Americans began driving the first automobiles across a patchwork network of highways, sky signs served as bright, beckoning beacons that could be easily spotted from miles around.
Neon lights also debuted in the 1920s, and their distinctive glowing colors quickly became a standard feature of commercial signage, seemingly overnight.
Used by everyone from mom-and-pop shops to department stores, by the 1940s, neon signs were synonymous with nightlife entertainment and what is now referred to as Streamline Moderne architecture.
Clubs, diners, and movie theaters of the era often prominently incorporated neon elements into their sleek, curvaceous designs inspired by an increasingly mobile world of planes, trains, and automobiles.
The creative zenith of signmaking emerged with the advent of the Interstate Highway System in the mid-20th century.
Far-out, futuristic signs inspired by the Space Age and the Atomic Era dominated in the 1950s and 60s, today closely associated with Googie architecture, which originated in southern California and spread unevenly throughout the country.
Popular elements of Googie-derived signs included:
Many signs of the era were more down-to-earth in their inspiration: roadside business signs often incorporated symbols that were evocative of their specific locale or region — a chomping alligator on the entrance sign for Okefenokee Swamp Park in Georgia, for instance (pictured above).
Other signs were more exotic in flavor, capitalizing on the Tiki culture that emerged in the White middle class following World War II, using symbols and typefaces that were stereotypically Polynesian, Hawaiian, or Pan-Asian.
Typically designed by local sign makers, vernacular roadside signs were often used as distinctive focal points for structures that were otherwise unremarkable and interchangeable — see one hole-in-the-wall motel, for instance, and you’ve seen them all. It was the sign that was memorable, not the building.
Vernacular signs were already falling out of fashion when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, a husband-and-wife architectural team from Philadelphia, galvanized the architectural world with the 1972 publication of Learning from Las Vegas, in which they praised vernacular road signs for their “architecture of communication over space”1 and presented them as a legitimate art form worthy of analysis.
Venturi and Scott Brown accused architects of designing to suit “their own particular upper-middle-class values, which they assign to everyone” and admonished them to “gain insight from the commonplace”.2
Yet even as architects began drawing inspiration from them, by the 1970s, vernacular roadside signs were steadily supplanted by standardized signs that became more subdued, less conspicuous, and thoroughly homogenous.
Today, roadside signs from the mid-20th century are nearly extinct, often regulated out of existence by restrictive sign ordinances or demolished when their associated businesses close or succumb to redevelopment. Those that remain are either in a state of decay or have been well-maintained and, in some cases, skillfully restored.
If you’re hunting for relic roadside signs in the United States, there are a few good places to start:
These relic signs are quaint reminders of a time when the appeal of travel lay in the freedom of its uncertainty and little surprises, when Americans weren’t so embedded in the illusion of control, merely navigating from one planned destination to the next on routes prescribed by machine, coddling our consumed minds with the bland promise of comfort, safety, and familiarity.
Or, perhaps, that time never existed at all.
The map below charts the location of every vintage sign I’ve photographed so far, with accompanying images. Many of the signs have since been removed.
May the darkness of fear and illusion dissipate;
May the light of grace and truth shine through.
Henry W. Grady (1850-1889) was the editor of The Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s, as well as the originator and chief proselytizer of “The New South” mythology that Atlanta still clings to as gospel.
If anyone in post-Civil War America was unaware of Grady’s conception of the New South, he considered it his life’s mission to indoctrinate them, criss-crossing the United States and preaching his message of a resurgent South in a series of public speeches.
Grady’s big idea was to decrease the Southeast’s economic reliance on agriculture and attract industry to the region with cheap labor, envisioning Atlanta as its epicenter.
The city and mythology soon became synonymous, and Atlanta developed a reputation as a progressive, “wide-awake” metropolis in a region that had long been viewed as backward and rural.
The vision of the New South was anything but progressive, however, and Grady was simply regurgitating the stale promises of capitalism with a Southern twang.
He was also an avowed White supremacist who lamented the region’s “Negro problem,” which is to say, that Black people existed at all. Among some of Grady’s choice remarks on the subject is this subtle proclamation:
But the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards, because the white race is the superior race.1
In other words, the New South was to be built on the same old bullshit as the Old South.
Americans love to deify racist orators, and when Grady suddenly died in December 1889, he was immediately beatified by White Atlantans as some patron saint of the city. A movement quickly grew to erect a monument to him, and in March 1890, a local committee accepted the design for a bronze statue sculpted by Alexander Doyle.3
The Henry Grady monument was unveiled in a lavish public ceremony on October 21, 1891,4 which the Constitution predictably covered as if it were the event of the century, claiming that crowds in attendance ranged from 25,000 to 50,000 people,5 no doubt greatly exaggerated since the city’s population was less than 70,000 at the time.6
A monument to Grady wasn’t enough, however, and for decades the city slapped his name on various streets and buildings, including Grady Memorial Hospital and Grady High School in Midtown. The high school finally dropped his name in 2021,7 but the hospital remains “Grady”, and it’s hard to imagine a world in which Atlantans would ever call it anything else.
The Grady monument was erected at the intersection of Marietta and Forsyth Streets, and during the 1906 Atlanta race massacre, it served as an altar for the bodies of three Black men murdered by an angry White mob.
As the Constitution told the story:
One of the worst battles of the night was that which took place around the postoffice. Here the mob, yelling for blood, rushed upon a negro barber shop just across from the federal building.
“Get ’em. Get ’em all.” With this for their slogan, the crowd, armed with heavy clubs, canes, revolvers, several rifles, stones and weapons of every description, made a rush upon the negro barber shop. Those in the first line of the crowd made known their coming by throwing bricks and stones that went crashing through the windows and glass doors.
Hard upon these missiles rushed such a sea of angry men and boys as swept everything before them.
The two negro barbers working at their chairs made no effort to meet the mob. One man held up both his hands. A brick caught him in the face, and at the same time shots were fired. Both men fell to the floor. Still unsatisfied, the mob rushed into the barber shop, leaving the place a mass of ruins.
The bodies of both barbers were first kicked and then dragged from the place. Grabbing at their clothing, this was soon torn from them, many of the crowd taking these rags of shirts and clothing home as souvenirs or waving them above their heads to invite to further riot.
When dragged into the street, the faces of both barbers were terribly mutilated, while the floor of the shop was met with puddles of blood. On and on these bodies were dragged across the street to where the new building of the electric and gas company stands. In the alleyway leading by the side of this building the bodies were thrown together and left there.
At about this time another portion of the mob busied itself with one negro caught upon the streets. He was summarily treated. Felled with a single blow, shots were fired at the body until the crowd for its own safety called for a halt on this method, and yelled “Beat ’em up. Beat ’em up. You’ll kill good white men by shooting.”
By way of reply, the mob began beating the body of the negro, which was already far beyond any possibility of struggle or pain. Satisfied that the negro was dead, his body was thrown by the side of the two negro barbers and left there, the pile of three making a ghastly monument to the work of the night, and almost within the shadow of the monument of Henry W. Grady.
So much for the city too busy to hate.
The Grady statue still stands at the intersection of Marietta and Forsyth Streets in Downtown Atlanta, but it’s easy to overlook. In June 1996, it was moved 10 feet from its original spot for greater visibility,8 but it remains surrounded on both sides by a canyon of glass and steel buildings that casts the monument in near-constant shadow — that’s probably for the best.
When the statue was unveiled in 1891, W.W. Goodrich felt the need to offer his thoughts on the subject — because of course he did — with remarks to the Constitution that should be viewed with great skepticism, given his well-noted propensity for lying.
In the following article excerpt, Goodrich claims to have had “several conversations” with Grady — “in his sanctum,” no less –and acts as if the two men were intimate friends.
Let’s do some quick math here: Goodrich came to Atlanta in September 1889,9 and Grady died on December 23, 1889, after a month-long bout of pneumonia, during which time he also took extended trips to New York and Boston.10
Would a no-name newcomer from California have been able to engage in “several conversations” with Grady in under 3 months? I have serious doubts.
Here, Goodrich also compares Grady to Abraham Lincoln, with whom he was apparently quite enamored [see also: “The President and the Bootblack“], sharing an apocryphal tale about Lincoln that he undoubtedly pulled straight from his ass.
And on that note, we won’t be hearing much more of Goodrich’s bullshit for a while. Thank God.
All during the day, and away into every night, there is a group around the Grady statue. Yesterday it was surrounded all day by men, women and children, who were studying the bronze figure. As late as 10 o’clock last night there were at least twenty people in front of the statue, gazing at it.
Mr. W.W. Goodrich, the architect, says:
Looking upon that face in living bronze, studying its points of character, the many thoughts of the several conversations I had with him pass in review before my memory. Shortly after making Atlanta my home, I called upon Mr. Grady in his sanctum. Always courteous, cordial, and painstaking in a marked degree, to make a stranger at home, in his beloved city, was he to every one. He never referred to the past, but that he predicted from out of it would arise in the south, in this favored region, the grandest lives of our future republic. He predicted that the mighty forces of science would hereabout establish those appliances of labor that would elevate the new south above her most rosy anticipations.
“And why not,” said Mr. Grady to me once, “about us all are the minerals, inexhaustible, that are used in manufacturing enterprises. Our fields give us the raw material for our spindles to manipulate, our firesides are aglow with fuel from nearabout, our food products can all be raised here, our climate cannot be excelled, our transportation facilities place us speedily in all the markets of the world. Again, the active hands behind all this are young men who were boys after the surrender. From bank presidents down to humble vocations, our young men are the leading spirits.”
And whilst I listened to the speeches of Mr. Clark Howell and his co-laborers, at the unveiling ceremonies last Wednesday, I could not help but think of Mr. Grady’s remarks: “Our young men are back of it all, and are the active hands in the forwarding of all this remarkable prosperity and progress.”
Atlanta is peculiarly a city of young men. Their influence is felt on every hand, in every vocation, trade or profession. The brainy young men are back of it all, of all this wonderful and real prosperity, of all this great progress, and the future greatness of our city can be ascribed to the young men. And Mr. Grady was a young man. His addresses show the fire of youth with the mannered culture of experience. The young men of the new south are her bone and sinew, the coming giants in the political arena. The star of empire, for solid practical government, that government of the people, for the people, and by the people, that government of genuine Americans for Americans, is here in the south. From my observation, I verily believe there is more Americanism in the south than in all the rest of the country put together; and more love of American institutions for what they have been, for what they are and for what they will be in the future.
Mr. Grady admired the character of Lincoln, and with emotion remarked that the south lost her best friend when Mr. Lincoln died. He stated that Washington and Lincoln were the two greatest men of the world. And Governor Hill, in his remarkable eulogy of Mr. Grady, at the unveiling ceremonies, likened Washington, Lincoln and Grady as the three greatest men of our country.
Having occasion to visit Philadelphia during the early part of the war, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward were in a car with several distinguished confederate soldiers on parole. These gentlemen were personally known to Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward, and as they chatted together in a most cordial manner, one of the confederate officers said: “Mr. President, what think you of the war?” Grasping the subject instantly, Mr. Lincoln asked:
“General, what do you think of the old flag?” The general’s color instantly turned and he did, not answer. Rising from his seat across the aisle he paced up the car and back to Mr. Lincoln’s seat and finally replied: “Right there was the south’s mistake.” “Yes,” said Mr. Lincoln, “had the south come north with the old flag, there would have been no war.”
I asked Mr. Grady is he had ever heard of the above conversation. He said that he had from one of the generals who was with Mr. Lincoln at that time. He stated the general’s name, and this same general was a very prominent man in the confederacy, and also stated that Mr. Lincoln’s remark about the old flag, was the truth.
Referring to this conversation, at a subsequent interview, Mr. Grady said: “There as one distinct thought that occurs to me, and that is this, Mr. Lincoln was peculiarly a man of the masses, and not of the classes.” Mr. Grady was a man of the masses, and not of the classes, and therein he was like Mr. Lincoln. His strong position with the masses made his paper, The Constitution, to be read by untold thousands all over the country, who saw in the new south that future of prosperity and progress that was typical in Mr. Grady’s greatness of heart, and of which he was the prime mover and its unflinching champion.11
It’s hard to nail down a precise date for this fantastic Googie-style sign, but it was likely erected sometime after 1957.
The Town Motel opened in 19511 and expanded in 1957,2 but newspaper images from both dates show two completely different signs — neither of them was this one.
An undated postcard, pictured below, shows the sign in its original — and much more pristine — condition, noting that the motel was owned and managed by Mr. and Mrs. Charles D. Mitchell and Son, who operated the establishment from 1951 to at least 1960.3
The following article was published in The Southern Architect in 1893 and written by W.W. Goodrich, an architect who practiced in Atlanta between 1889 and 1895.
The Southern Architect was a monthly trade journal conceived and initially published by Thomas H. Morgan of Bruce & Morgan, patterned after national architectural publications like The American Architect, which gave scant coverage to work in the Southeast, likely because the region’s architecture was — on the whole — terrible.
Speaking to an audience of his peers, Goodrich echoes many familiar complaints shared by professional architects in the late 1800s, when the industry was almost entirely unregulated, and any builder, carpenter, or cabinet-maker could call themselves an architect, copy a building plan from a pattern book, and pass it off as their own.
In a region as vainglorious as the Deep South, where the appearance of wealth and the illusion of status have long been valued over character and substance, the grotesque and excessive designs of substandard architects in the 19th century were not only admired but prized.
Here, Goodrich places the blame for bad architecture squarely on the clients, mocking the poor taste and ludicrous sense of entitlement that have always defined the newly monied. And although he specifically avoids mention of Atlanta (“Every city is cursed with it”, he notes), surely his chief inspiration was the city’s insufferable nouveau riche — and really, there is no other riche in Atlanta.
At the time of this article’s publication, Goodrich’s practice in Atlanta was waning, and he’d no doubt experienced his fill of the city’s empty boasting and repellent arrogance — although he was pretty full of shit himself.
Goodrich’s acerbic, cutting language in this article contrasts sharply with the facile, fawning tone he affected in earlier articles for The Atlanta Journal, more closely resembling the embittered words of another Atlanta architect, G.L. Norrman.
Indeed, the picture painted by Goodrich is bleak: The legitimate architect is resigned to tossing his ideas in the trash, while “Mr. Newrich” demands “another incongruous architectural absurdity that the architect is not responsible for, and should not be blamed for.”
And thus is Atlanta architecture in a nutshell.
There are no incongruities in the designs of modern architects, no fallacious fancies. In writing about modern architects I mean those only who are genuine members of the profession; “Educated for the Profession.” I do not include any one in the noble profession of architecture who is an architect and builder – or one who furnishes designs from books and periodicals.
That there are incongruities in the designs and in the buildings of the so-called “architects and builders” goes without question.
Shameful examples are on every hand of the “architect and builder’s” botch work.
Every city is cursed with it, glaring at the observer at every turn. Any one can detect the carpenter or mason architect. The carpenter architect puts on his facades all the turned work, all the scroll work, all the ornamental work, so-called, that he can possibly get on, i.e., gingerbread work. He will put on domes in unheard of places, towers that look like pigeon houses or children’s playhouses perched upon a roof, straddle of a ridge, or perched in a valley, and in out of the way places.
Any ornamentation that his untutored mind imagines is to him a work of art, and readily finds a resting place on his buildings. An utter lack of harmony, of symmetry and of sympathy is in all his work from cellar to attic, while the real architect is blamed for the unprofessional hideousness of the wood butcher.
The mason architect runs riot on arches that will not carry the load and the thrust flattens them so that they fall by their own weight; arches that gravitate to the ground.
Then there is the civil engineer who sets himself up as an architect without any architectural study whatever. His designs and buildings look like railroad roundhouses or car shops, massive as the pyramids.
I admit the foundation of architecture, “the science of construction,” is engineering, but I do not admit that the ornamental, the harmony of detail, the grouping of mass, the blending of the line between earth and sky is engineering. “It is the music of the soul,” that infinite inspiration of the imagination, that looks in and through all that is beautiful and weaves the warp and woof of the soul’s fancy into a creation; that compels all to know that a master brain has left the imprints of a genius, of a glorious creation, that is a monument for all time to come. To inspiration this creation is simplicity itself, quiet dignity in material, color, form and construction. “A babe can comprehend it.” The simple vine, the color of the lily, the structural construction of canes, the grouping of mass, where weight is required to be sustained, these are the interesting points of the study of the architect.
He does not look after false effects to incorporate them into his building. He avoids them, he shuns them. His whole ambition is to blend his material that the effect shall be an architectural symphony at once attractive but not false, in the which the object is subservient to the client’s demand and the cash account used to the best advantage, so that there shall be no waste.
Clients are solely to blame for all the incongruities of modern architecture, in nearly every instance.
Mr. Newrich or Mrs. Struckile wants a home. It must excel in sublimity the palaces of the world; it must be the most picturesque and distinguished home in the city; the most exquisite charm of the avenue. Mr. T. Square is called upon for designs. He is recognized as an expert and a gentleman of large experience, thoroughly up in his profession. His charges are the regular institute ones, “which all gentlemen should adhere to” without exception.
The newly rich client says: I want so and so – it is my taste; I want my plan like this; at which Mr. T. Square, with his keen discernment of men and things from long practice with an extensive clientele, and with an eye to the etiquette of his most noble calling, says, such and such things won’t work out, won’t harmonize, are not in good taste, are of bad form, and won’t make a pleasing whole, and will be exceedingly incongruous. And he shows the client the utter lack of sense in the client’s demands and wishes, “of course in a gentlemanly way.”
“But, Mr. T. Square, it is my money that pays for what I want, and if you won’t work up my ideas and build as I want, I can get some one that will.”
Poor Mr. T. Square; his professional standing conflicts with his bread and butter; he hates to create a botch, yet his family must have bread; either lose the job, or do work that his very sensitive soul shrinks from touching because he knows that he is and will be held responsible for an incongruous blemish on his architectural escutcheon.
His ability is unquestioned, his record is proof against all vilification, but if he erects the building he will be held responsible for an architectural monstrosity, an incongruous mass. Alas! Others will do it if he won’t, and he quietly puts his views in the wastebasket and is dictated to by Mr. Newrich, and the consequences are another incongruous architectural absurdity that the architect is not responsible for, and should not be blamed for.
W.W. Goodrich2