Signage

The city is constantly being written

May 09, 2026

“The Young Sailor II” (1906), Henri Matisse

Posters advertised drum lessons and guitar lessons. A yard sale, a design sale, a closet clean-out. On several telephone poles were laser-printed 8x11s depicting a personal trainer named “Luv Me,” or his business was named “Luv Me,” either way I was confused.

If the city is a book, it’s being written constantly, and homemade signs are the Post-Its on the manuscript: applique-d, torn off, thrown away. A walk this week yielded dozens, maybe hundreds of signs—and that was ignoring (for the most part) all the business placards and corporate billboards and bar neon, because I’m more interested in the handmade and taped-up, those printed in Colby Poster fashion.

Comedy nights, disco nights, gallery openings.

A kink-positive “play party” with a phone number to call.

The posters appear to change out weekly if not daily—a taco festival, a spring fair, a rodeo. There were posters promoting politicians who said they stood for working families. Several posters promoted Honey, a young pitbull looking for a good home, while another asked for information about Mushie, a rescue French Bulldog gone missing, for whom there was a phone number to call and a $10,000 reward (and a website).

A club for Latinos who wanted to improve their Spanish.

Soltera y su sonido sexual, also with a phone number to call.

Speaking of, what I didn’t see much of were any tear-away phone numbers, the kind you traditionally saw on flyers pinned to community bulletin boards—they’d been replaced by QR codes. I scanned one code for an “adult immersive scavenger hunt.” Another for “gay and lonely?” A third for a woman offering hypnotherapy, though that one looked more like a personal ad than anything else.

One poster, headlined “Try Group Therapy,” had three different QR codes for different therapeutic needs: “Existential Artist Group,” “Body Acceptance Group,” “Childless Grief & Hope.”

Are street posters effective? Do they give good ROI? Perhaps most beautiful, constructive or not, are the handwritten or hand-typed posters, similar to notes left on windshields—admonishments, wishes, public letters. One I found taped to several lampposts instructed dog owners to clean up after their dogs. I’ll quote it in full, typos and capitalizations and odd spacings intact:

Dog Owners / Runners
Please don’t have your dogs poop on sidewalks, people’s driveways, front doors, gates. Have them do their business on dirt patch/ grass area by street side, Doesn’t matter if you pick up, still some left that’s tracked al over the place by runners, walkers into people’s homes.
You wouldn’t want doggy poop all over into your home, garage, WOULD YOU? You wouldn’t want to go home after a hard day of work to clean up someone else’s doggy poop outside and inside all over your home, WOULD YOU?
Runners / Walkers carry a good light, watch where you’re stepping.
Do you REALLY want doggy poop all over in your home? Where your children play? Where you relax? Eat dinner? In your car?
Dog Owners, don’t have your dogs pee/ poop on people s gardens, children play areas, Not Necessary, thats so many people’s only joy in this stressful world.
You wouldn’t want other people to make you suffer, clean up, disrespect you, your family and children, Would You?

In college, “signs” were something I steered away from, the semiotics and critical theorists, signifiers and signifieds. Still, what the posters mean outside the fences of what they say is interesting. Are they yearnings of the lonely? Capitalism meets song? My city is constantly shedding, changing its skin, and all the old wheat-pastes and flapping flyers are part of the molting.

One billboard, high above the street, advertised a skateboard magazine with “Sure He Makes $100k But Can He Kickflip?” Though my favorite poster was less commercial, more romantic—

Guy Seeks Girlfriend
ME:
50-ish, intellectual, director/writer/filmmaker,
homeowner, liberal, atheist...
LIKES:
Sondheim Deep Conversation Cats
Yard Sales Critical Thinking Pepsi
Cooking Movies with Subtitles Tex-Mex
Ghost Stories Pizza Theatre Chocolate
Classic Film Screenings Board Games
Libraries Mini-Golf Irony Film Noir
Truth Beauty Love Art
DISLIKES:
Trump Disney Marvel
New-Age Hooey Bro Culture
Reality TV Trump

It was one of the few posters, I’ll note, that did feature tear-aways with a phone number—and maybe only because this guy-seeking-girlfriend, 50-ish, was too old for QR codes. If so, good for him: several of the slips of paper were gone.

Perhaps signs, however transient, can lead to things more lasting.

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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus a monthly travel-lust ballyhoo.

Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.