Here’s a shot from long ago in Prince’s Bay, Staten Island, where I was bumbling along with a camera in 1998 when I spotted a pair of Staten Island classic black on gold street signs. These vinyl numbers first appeared in 1964 and were standard issue through the mid-1980s.
Peterson’s Lane doesn’t turn up on most Staten Island street maps, so it’s no wonder the DOT missed it at first. But find it they did, and this pair has long since been replaced.
12/11/13
2 comments
Growing up on Staten Island I remember nothing BUT these mustard yellow signs. I always thought it was cool that Staten Island and Manhattan shared the same color signage, while the other three boroughs had to make do with their own colors.
The AMBOY RD sign looks like it was from the first set of color-coded signs produced in 1964, two years into the Henry Barnes era. It would seem that the signmakers didn’t get this was for 9″ high signs, and laid out the type as though they were working with 6″ high signs, as ‘AMBOY’ was in 4″ high letters of Highway Gothic C and ‘RD’ was 2″ high (either Highway Gothic C or D). By 1965 or so, the Department of Traffic signmakers made a few changes: a) they added 5″ high letters (only used up to 1966), b) they started working with Highway Gothic B for some applications, and c) they added 36″ long signs to their itinerary (initial signs at the start of the color-coded era were all 24″ long apparently, if based on this 1965 photo of a very hard-to-read Broadway sign on its northwest corner with West 52nd Street; notice the older black-on-yellow signage from the T.T. Wiley era on the southeast corner; as well, several blue-on-white Queens Boulevard signs in Queens that survived into the 1980’s were set on 24″ long signs, with ‘QUEENS’ in 5″ high Highway Gothic B, and ‘BLVD’ in 2″ Highway Gothic B).