Heritage, Volume 8, Number 3, Summer 1990 Page: 20
30 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Signs
Preserving a Sense of Place
George KramerIn recent years the preservation of America's urban
commercial landscape has shifted from a focus on single
resources toward a district-wide approach that recognizes
the role that a building's setting or context plays in its ability to
successfully relate our past. Areas that have maintained a
significant degree of collective integrity and are linked to some past
event or era are identified and designated as "historic." As part of
this process local governments often establish a system to review
new development that protects and enhances historic appearances
and associations. The design management of the appearance of
such areas frequently is problematic. These "Old Towns" usually
are the most successful commercial areas in a given city. In many
instances their success and affluence bring increased land values
and development pressures that can generate project proposals
that are at odds with the district's historic image. The normal
preser-vation goal of maintaining "historic" integrity is threatened
by the conflicting requirements of modem economic and
aesthetic concerns.
One element in the historic commercial landscape that is
especially subject to modem aesthetic regulation is for-profit
advertising signs. Throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, neon and
other types of signs played an accepted, and appreciated, role in the
physical appearance of urban America. Signs formed an exuberant,
kinetic landscape that, especially at night, accurately reflected the
hustle-bustle of the booming postwar American business world.
Since the 1960s, however, planners and design professionals have
tended to view signage as a negative element to be limited and
controlled. Generally preservationists have not considered signs as
a resource worthy of merit and as a result, in areas that have been
designated as "historic," signs are usually subject to stringent codes
that regulate their height, size, design, and materials so as not to
detract from the area's historic ambiance. Such regulations, often
by intent, create a sterile homogenous signscape based upon an
assumption that historic areas were once free of crass
commercialism. Often without opposition from preservation
organizations, sign codes actually require the removal of potentially
significant elements of America's past.
Modem land use ordinances in the United States govern
virtually every aspect of the use of real property and the design of
the structures built upon it. Few if any other non-hazardous
elements within a city are as subject to control as are commercial
signs. The development of this high level of control can be traced
back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when
rising interest in urban life and civic design coalesced into the socalled
"City Beautiful" movement. In response to the ever-present
billboard, American cities and towns sought to increase their
regulation over what had formerly been viewed as "aesthetic"
matters. To do so legally, cities tried to expand the interpretation
of the municipal grant of "police power" to regulate health, safety,
and public welfare to include controls on the design, construction,
and placement of advertising. A lengthy series of legal decisions
spanning the entire first half of the twentieth century defined the
many constitutional issues surrounding aesthetic control. These
legal battles culminated with the 1954 United States Supreme
Court decision of Berman v. Parker in which Justice Douglas wrote:
20 HERITAGE * SUMMER 1990The concept of the public welfare is broad and
inclusive... The values it represents are spiritual
as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary.
It is within the power of the legislature to
determine that a community should be beautiful
as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, wellbalanced
as well as carefully patrolled.1
Confident of the legality of aesthetic regulations, cities and
other governments entered a new era in the control of billboards
and on-site commercial signage. By the 1960s and 1970s sign codes
became an accepted and infrequently contested element of
virtually every major city land development ordinance. New
signage was subject to strict limits on size, placement on a structure,
number of signs allowed, and building materials. The use of some
materials or methods of construction, such as neon signs or
internally illuminated signs were banned outright within
designated "historic" areas as being inconsistent with the
traditional appearance. While the variety of the actual message,
within the limits of normal standards,2 was protected by the
constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, by the end of the
1960s virtually every other component of a sign could be, and
was, rigorously controlled.
The general impact of the mass control of any particular
element within the urban landscape raises a variety of philosophical
questions that go to the heart of the propriety of design
control itself. After even a brief period, strong and all encompassing
control of any landscape element can do little else but
create a generally homogenous, and at least from a typical planner's
viewpoint, improved and less distracting, streetscape. Such control
stifles creative expression by allowing only a limited and
acceptable range of designs based upon a potentially unjustifiable
or biased current interpretation of what is "pretty" or correct.
In designated historic commercial areas, those portions of our
cities and towns that have been singled out for their special
qualities, development plans are usually subject to a greater degree
of design scrutiny than less historic areas. The intent of such review
is to better provide for the maintenance of the traditional
and historic integrity for which the area was recognized in the first
place. Since signs are such a visible and potentially characterdefining
element of a streetscape, they tend-to be even more regulated
than other landscape elements in historic areas or National
Register Historic Districts. Within such areas signs may be required
to conform to a historic "theme" or "period" that is thought to be
in keeping with the area's significance. It is often assumed that the
use of a "theme" or restoration program is limited solely to
"Frontier" facades or the type of"Ye Olde Shoppe"' design typical
of early preservation attempts. More insidious as a program is the
adoption of a period of significance, a definition used by the National
Register process to establish a time frame during which a given
resource or area developed or gained significance as a determiner
of appropriate design. Problems arise not at the Register level, but
when local merchants or governments adopt a period of
significance as an acid test, linked to a marketing plan, in evaluating
both restorations and new design throughout an area.
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 8, Number 3, Summer 1990, periodical, Summer 1990; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45427/m1/20/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.