Tittle-Tattle . . . or Spot the Overdot

An observant person might notice that this street name sign lacks a tittle:

(a tittle is the dot we usually see on lowercase “i” and “j”)

A thorough person might walk around to the other side of the sign & notice something else amiss:

There are three possibilities for what happened here:

1.  The same person(s) who continue to steal this street sign decided to be playful with the dots.

2.  The cunning linguists of the DPW sign shop are experimenting with the diacritic known as the overdot — maybe they know something about the pronunciation of Richardson that the rest of us don’t.  But it’s a bit off-centered over the “o”, so maybe it’s one-half of a diaeresis.

3.  The missing tittle from the other side was probably left behind on the release paper [used with vinyl adhesive plotter-cut lettering] & transferred erroneously when the second side was affixed.

But I welcome other suggestions!

Worcester Whimsy or Sign Shop Sedition?

It never ceases to amaze me how the city can always find the funds to replace street name signs that don’t need replacing, but our potholes go unfilled.

I’m also dazzled by the variety of typefaces the DPW sign shop uses on our signs.  Someone’s quietly working their way through all of the typefaces in their fonts menu.  They’ve gone past “C” already, so some kind soul must have deleted Comic Sans before they got to it.

This sign replaced a legible one within the past couple of months:

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a “Hearts & Serifs” cabal in this city’s administration.  The above sign certainly has serifs and a heart, but flies in the face of the most frequent excuse I’ve heard for unnecessary sign replacement — that the street name needs to be in uppers & lowers, not all uppercase like the trusty signs of yore.  Hey, at least there’s one lowercase letter on that sign.

Just up the street from there are two signs that were replaced a couple of years ago:

Worcester’s certainly not hung up on consistency. We’ve spiced up our Times New Roman here with a dash of Helvetica Bold in uppercase.  Too bad they didn’t check the bottom one’s spelling against their own street listing — it should be “DiGregorio”. not Digregorio.

Some signs just leave me scratching my head.  Here’s a sign they put up this winter:

The uppercase “AVE” looks like quite the afterthought.  That sign replaced one that looked like this:

The latter may be a bit unexciting, but it was effective.  With marching orders & a bottomless budget from on high, though, there’s no limit to what the DPW can spend on sign replacement, nor are there any standards or guidelines to which they are being held.  There’s a persistent nagging from downtown to get hearts & serifs up for some peculiarly OCD reason, but the folks at the sign shop take every other creative license possible as they festoon our street corners with every imaginable signage variation, while the taxpayer foots the bill.

Is it just latent creativity that’s behind this, or is the sign shop revolting against its taskmasters in some sort of passive-aggressive quest to embarrass the “Hearts & Serifs” gang downtown?

What if Worcester did it right?

This handsome street name sign is fully MUTCD compliant:

It features a full City of Worcester seal, correctly sized typography in uppercase/lowercase as required by the latest standards, is correctly positioned both vertically and horizontally on the sign blank, and uses a FHWA-approved typeface which is designed to be readable from greater distances than typical fonts.

As you may have guessed by now, this is one that the DPW’s sign shop did not create.  Worcester prefers to ignore the research & experience of the FHWA by using a serif-style typeface better suited to term papers & recipes.  And I’m sure it’s less bother to spit out a red dingbat heart than actually print Worcester’s beautiful seal.

Mediocrity, thy name is Worcester.

Mallard Quackery

Quasi-Kudos to the DPW for replacing the ’60s-era street sign at Mallard Road.  Frequent readers may recall, back in February I mentioned that the DPW, while fixing a nearby hydrant,  might want to consider replacing this sign:

Thanks to a mysteriously bountiful sign replacement budget, they’ve now put up a new sign:

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first-ever yellow sign replaced under the current “Hearts & Serifs” Blitzkrieg of the past dozen years.  As far as I can tell, every other sign replaced has been of much later vintage, and the priority seems to be to replace the most legible ones first.

Why the “quasi-kudos”?  Besides any distaste I may have for serifs on street signs, notice the different shading on the backer beneath “Rd”.  They seem to have repaired this sign with material that doesn’t match the original.  Perhaps this first left the shop as “Mallard Blvd” or “Mallard Ct” and had to be corrected by the poor installers.

Of greater concern is the angle at which the sign is mounted.  It’s nearly illegible from any great distance — here it is as it appears from Upland Street westbound:

And eastbound isn’t much better:

And perhaps I’m nit-picking, but how hard would it have been to reuse the “Not A Thru Street” that was affixed to the original, since we don’t seem to have left the sign shop supplied with a new one?

So while I’m reservedly grateful on behalf of the Mallard Rd. folks that they’ve finally got a new sign after 50 years, I think we could have done a whole lot better by them.

And we still haven’t fixed the little trench left after the hydrant repair:
You can’t tell from the photo, but despite the cold patch, the middle of that rectangle is several inches below the level of the street.  Enough to knock your dentures out if you hit it while going 25 miles per hour in your Buick.

Can’t get there from here

This pretty sign recently got damaged by a tall truck:

In addition to making a left, if you want to go to Worcester Center Boulevard, you’ll also need a time machine, because that street no longer exists.

At the moment, most of it is still there physically . . . during a flurry of street name changes that occurred a few years ago, though, the portion that circled the mall garages was renamed “Foster St.”, and the rest became Major Taylor Boulevard .  Online maps now reflect the changes:

I wonder how long we’ll have signs with the old name?  Perhaps the clumsy trucker tried to do us a favor & get the sign replacement done sooner rather than later.

If I were going to seek out a street of the past, I might prefer Blackstone Street, which ran parallel to Summer Street.  Unfortunately, it’s now buried under the kudzu-festooned parking garage of “Medical City“.

Window Dressing

From an era when a dingbat was on "All In The Family" instead of adorning our street signs.

Sloppy Seconds for Armandale

(This post is dedicated to Wilkie Collins)

A few months ago the bent & misspelled Times-New-Roman “Armadale” street sign in 01603 vanished.  It’s not clear whether it was the target of random vandalism, or if disgruntled residents of that street finally took it down in disgust after it remained there for several years as a monument to DPW carelessness & disregard.  Perhaps incoming DPW Sign Shop boss Richard Fields quietly yanked it down in utter embarrassment.  Whatever the case may be, Armandale went without a sign at its Main St. terminus for a while this year.  I imagine the residents didn’t mourn its loss.  (Its companion at the Apricot St. terminus remains in place, properly spelled and in a legible sans-serif typeface.)

A few weeks ago the empty post at the Main St. end of Armandale got a “new” sign.

We can see that the DPW has gotten better at proofreading, but still finds the concept of “quality control” elusive.  This sign is mounted off-center even though centering it would have caused no obstruction to anything nearby.  Presumably the blank is a reused one, and they installed it wherever they found an existing hole in the blank, rather than take a moment to drill a new hole.  It also appears to be held on with one bolt, which bodes ill for it remaining in place very long.

Whoever made the new sign has an aversion to rulers, as they didn’t leave themselves enough of the retroreflective green backer to cover the length of the blank.  They “fixed” this by adding a 3/4″ strip on the end — good to see that Worcester’s elementary school arts & crafts classes haven’t been in vain.

While we’re critiquing things, if they were going to leave the “St” the same size as the rest of the name, I think a bit of space away from the final “e” of Armandale would have been more effective than clicking that little “superscript” button, don’t you?

Mysterious Pearson

Go for a drive down Granite St. some day and you may see this lonely street name sign:

Welcome to Pearson Street, 01607.

On first glance, this “street” seems home only to a discarded packet which once embraced some McDonald’s fries. Otherwise it’s woodland. Nor does the sign point to a street on the other side of Granite Street — come do a visual pirouette with me:

The circular driveway located there certainly couldn’t be Pearson St. At first I thought I’d discovered Worcester’s own Brigadoon, where the street and all its denizens vanish every hundred years and are known only to ancient DPW workers who’re AWOL on decades-long coffee breaks.

Unfortunately for Worcester’s hopes of a ready-for-Hollywood plot/location, there’s a real Pearson Street, though it’s actually two streets removed from Granite St.:

C’est la vie. Worcester has more of a Groundhog Day vibe than a Brigadoon one, anyway.

Beware the Vehicels

There are so many vehicels on NippNapp Trail that we need signage to warn us:

One warning isn’t enough.  Take a cruise down NippNapp with me:

While spelling isn’t a virtue on NippNapp, consistency is.

Heartless signage

If there were room for this sign below the 2nd floor window instead of above it, I think this sign would be more useful/effective.