Noted

One of the homemade street signs spotted along Avenue A. (There's one for No Parking on Avenue A at St. Mark's Place.) Be mindful of the cardboard tickets the city will issue.

Noted

Thanks to Alex G for sharing this photo... showing that 13th Street and Second Avenue is now 48th Street and Ninth Avenue... Welcome to Hell's Village.

The Joey Ramone street sign returns to Joey Ramone Place

[Photo from this morning]

After nearly a month-long absence, the city returned the Joey Ramone Place street sign yesterday afternoon (H/T Jessie Malin!) to the northeast corner of the Bowery and Second Street. (This block of Second Street is co-named for the frontman of the Ramones.)

It appeared that the light pole on this corner was under repairs. (Plus, the street sign looked as if it had been bashed a few times.)

The sign first went up in November 2003. The sign remains pretty high up there ...


[Photo from this morning]

This placement happened several years ago after the sign was previously stolen a half-dozen times. So workers raised the sign to 20 feet. Standard street signs are between 12 and 14 feet off the ground, per the Post.



Meanwhile, the two-year-old Joey Ramone-CBGB 40th anniversary mural a block away at Bleecker and the Bowery has been painted over in place of a Debbie Harry-Blondie mural by Shepard Fairey. Will post on that a little later.

The Joey Ramone street sign is currently MIA from Joey Ramone Place

The light pole on the northeast corner of the Bowery and Second Street appears to be under repair...



And with that, the street sign for this co-named stretch of Second Street — Joey Ramone Place — is also gone... (all the street signs on the pole are MIA)...



I reached out to the Department of Transportation to see when the sign(s) might return. An agency rep promised to get back to me.

And perhaps they'll be a new Joey Ramone Place sign. The one in place looked as if it had been whacked a few times...


[Photo from 2016]

The sign first went up in November 2003. The sign is pretty high up there now after reportedly being stolen a half-dozen times. Workers raised the sign to 20 feet. Standard street signs are between 12 and 14 feet off the ground, per the Post.


[Wikipedia Commons]

Or maybe someone at the Dept. of Transportation has a cousin who owns a sign company

Earlier this week, a worker was putting up new signs about the parking meters along Seventh Street... EVG Street Sign Correspondent Derek Berg captured the two versions of the signs...



The new posted sign features upper- and lower-case letters that are slightly larger. Easier to read? As I recall some years ago (WNYC story here), the feds were requiring the city to use a combination of upper- and lower-case letters as part of a safety move. Outrage!

Anyway, font commenters please chime in!

Hey look — new street signs!

Last Friday morning, we watched DOT employees start to put up new street signs on First Avenue...

So, before, the intersections looked like this via Google Maps with Street View...

[Whistling...not commenting]

Now, the city has placed the street names in a much more prominent position over the Avenues, as these photos by EV Grieve regular peter radley show...

Not sure how much difference they make to pedestrians ... but, if you're driving, you'll likely have an easier time finding, say, McSorley's ... And are these part of that federal mandate for all street signs to use a lowercase font called Clearview? I'm just not a font person.

'Another example of New York City's impending Americanization' — Street signs

We had a pleasant email exchange with East Village resident and EV Grieve reader James C. Taylor the other day. He sent us the following photo, noting that he was veering slightly off of our usual beat.

As much as we think we pay attention to things, such as street signs, I didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote:

"I spotted another example of New York City's impending Americanization: my first sighting of the generic conformist street signs. They may not look like much, but I was still shocked by their ability to make a quiet corner of Greenwich Village look like... well, every other town in the US."

Huh, don't these look like the street signs from, say, this corner?

No!

The signs themselves are basically the same, he said. The difference lies in the type. (He's a graphic designer, so he's into the whole font thing.)

"Notice how 'Greene' and 'St' are lower case? The signs on 9th and B (and all the others, going back to the yellow and black signs) all used a condensed uppercase typeface. The change is part of a federal mandate for all street signs to use a lowercase font called Clearview. I remember reading about it a few months back but hadn't seen one of the new signs until [the other day]."

Anyway, somehow we missed this entertaining story from the Daily News last Oct. 1, in which Bloomberg was a dick when asked about the federal mandate to change the font and capitalization on 250,000 city street signs by 2018.

Said James: "I used to refer to events like these as the encroachment of 'America' upon New York City, but these days it seems like New York is just submitting willingly to whatever 'America' wants. C'mon New York, where's your fight?"

According to that Daily News article, there was one man ready to stand up for New York: Rep. Anthony Weiner. Per the article: "Weiner ... wasn't shy about saying where he stood on the matter. He's considering sending a letter to the feds 'but I'm trying to figure out whether to put STUPID in all caps so they'll understand it.'"

One of those days

On Fulton Street near Water Street.

Noted

Took this shot at 13th Street and Fifth Avenue last night.

Wait, are we walking or stopping here?

On Third Avenue.

Things that EV Grieve lets bother him

Been plenty of discussion already about Bowery St and the Cemusa shelters. But would it have killed Cemusa to add the "th" after the street name or an "rd"? You know, 11th Street, 14th Street, 3rd Avenue.