Inspector Tupper related that “in many instances, people living in their immediate neighborhood could not tell him the name of the street they were living upon.” The record suggests various false starts at signage made in the subsequent years without reaching critical mass. The city’s Light Inspector took two months in the summer of 1902 to canvass the city, identifying 1,423 corners with no street signage at all. Some controversy arose because the expenditure had not been authorized in advance and one of those corners benefitting from taxpayer largesse was the Phelan Building owned by (and named for). These were said to be 36" x 8" in size, maroon and silver in color. In the late 1890s the downtown business district got a fresh set of “artistic” corner signs, this time designed and paid for by the city. The outlying and rural areas of the growing town had no such conveniences. The gas lamppost signs were criticized for being hard to read from their reverse side, and these lampposts were in any case limited to the “older and settled” portions of the city. In 1895, this format was upgraded in many locations to “flaming red” text on black background. Gas companies, which provided the street lighting of the late 1800s and into the 1900s, would paint the names of streets in black on the lamp glass at corners. The decades that followed saw complaints about wayfinding addressed with patchwork attempts by the city and others. This was as ineffective as it sounds reporting later confirmed that “no effort has ever been made to enforce the law, and as a consequence, few have taken the trouble to display the information.” The legislators pawned off the problem to property owners with a half-hearted new policy in 1883: all owners of real estate on the corners at intersections were required to “erect and maintain at their own cost and expense, street guides.” These early efforts did not suffice for long, as the city was sprawling quickly. If you zoom in real real close, you can just make out a tiny sign for “Montgomery St.” mounted some 20 feet off the ground in small lettering: Here is an early photograph showing the building at the corner of Montgomery and Clay streets in 1859. Street signs, to the extent they existed, were generally mounted to the buildings that happened to sit on corner lots. In the pre-automobile era, there was just no need for high-visibility, high-speed wayfinding. International tourism was not a consideration. And you could always slow your horse-drawn buggy to ask someone if you were lost. Most people living in cities this small already knew what the streets were, or didn’t care. There weren’t very many intersections to worry about. San Francisco was a town of fewer than 40,000 people Portsmouth Square was the center of the settlement and only the built-up area was included in the ordinance. The first street signage was authorized by ordinance in 1853 by the city Aldermen (forerunners of today’s Board of Supervisors). A nineteenth-century grab-bag (1853–1921)
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