The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

We often talk about beautification, meaning planting flowers or adding greenery, lighting, benches in a pedestrian area. We include clean-up where appropriate, public art where possible, underground irrigation where affordable. But we rarely stop to think how the place we are beautifying got into the shape it did that required beautification in the first place.

In other words, real words or otherwise, we don’t think about how it got uglified, a word that should exist and only does not because we are in denial that this is what we do to our surroundings.

If there is beautify, a verb, then there has to be a verb that describes the opposite and my vote is uglify.

Uglification doesn’t require much, it is much easier to achieve than beautification and that’s the real pity of it. All uglification takes is lack of taste and plenty of greed. A touch of desperation doesn’t hurt and a dash of selfishness completes the recipe for bold, boisterous, in your face ugly.

Uglification is so easy to achieve we can take a street in a modest neighbourhood and uglify it in a matter of hours with just two simple additions – abandoned cars and jumbled, tacky signage. Every now and then, the abandoned cars get cleaned up in a neighbourhood sweep thanks to a motivated member of parliament or community-minded individual and a company like Bahamas Waste which is called upon to donate trash hauling services or a towing company that offers its trucks and services at a reduced rate. Derelict vehicles and trash are relatively easy targets to identify and dispose of, but the number one cause of uglification remains. Signage.

Nothing changes the appearance of a street or community faster than signs. Think East Street South, for instance, and picture what the drive would look like without literally hundreds of signs. Imagine if that same area were free of all the plastic signs and tattered, torn banners and aged painted over plywood and instead had far fewer signs, attractive in their own way like the artistic hand-painted sign at Judy’s Bread Shop or the Jamaican shops nearby.

Imagine East Street South with standardised signage that looked very Bahamian, maybe even quaint, with business names instead of a steady stream of a dizzying graphics jungle of out of proportion, frequently garish desperate attempts to catch your eye and lure your business. Or think downtown, the difference in the quality of signage between brands like Cartier, all class and good taste mirroring the prestigious line of luxury goods, and several of the souvenir and t-shirt shops with signs that are far too large in perspective and proportion for the shop they adorn.

Did style go out of style? When? How did it happen? When and how did crass and crude replace taste, beauty and modesty? This is not about snobbishness, nor is it about cost. Some of the signs that qualify under the contributing to uglification category are horrendously expensive.

If you have been behind the gate at Lyford Cay or Old Fort Bay or Ocean Club Estates, Albany or Port New Providence, guess what you won’t see. You won’t see signs advertising anything. What you will see is a street sign at every corner and intersection so you can actually identify where you are, which is often a useful thing to do.

So not all signs were born bad and the history of signage is actually pretty interesting. According to Wikipedia (what did we ever do before it?) the term “sign” comes from the French, signe, which is a noun, and signer, a verb, meaning a gesture or a motion of the hand. (I am quoting verbatim.) That, in turn, comes from the Latin “signum” meaning an identifying mark, token, indication, symbol, proof, etc.

You can see where the history of signage is going with this. Think signal, even traffic signal, or a sign of the times, meaning symbolic. Think what signage was originally intended to do - direct - and how many thousands of years hand signals and other symbols did all that. And then came computers and relatively easy-to-use software changing how signs were created in a flash.

Signs were once a work of art and when properly designed and carved, moulded, constructed or painted actually enhanced a building or structure, even a water tower. I remember industrial cities in America where, as a child, I would look up in wonder at how they got those great big steel or brass letters to stick to a building and make it look prettier than it would have been without them. Those were the years when signs were part of architecture, but as graphics became more accessible to more people, and signs became easier to produce, the signage explosion erupted. Plastics became commonplace. Neon lights lit a small piece of sky. Huge logos, even prices glared at you and now in Nassau, all the rules that once applied and were meant to keep signage reasonable seemed to have evaporated or are being ignored despite the fact there is no new signage legislation.

Garish, flashing, tacky signs with multi-coloured rotating lights are altering the looks and changing the environment in places like Shirley Street, Faith Avenue and Carmichael Road.

This is not to insult or hurt leaders in the sign industry in New Providence. It would be hard to find a nicer, more community-minded man than Peter Bates, who founded The Sign Man and has grown the business into a major enterprise through hard work and dependability, or the mother-daughter team who run Signarama and are both highly creative, also hard-working people. I would be surprised if either company contributed to blinking or rotating signs and we need people like them to contribute to this conversation and bring our signage policies and rules into the 21st century.

At some point, our design sensitivity must kick in. Nothing alters our physical and built environment more than signage and we are ignoring this fact at our own peril, becoming de-sensitised to the uglification we are allowing to become entrenched. If we continue to accept it, future generations will know little else and unless and until they go behind the gates of places like Lyford Cay they will not appreciate how vastly different the landscape looks with only Nature’s enhancements on buildings and grounds.

Our ability to become immune to what is staring us right in the face is truly one of our greatest survival tactics as well as one of our self-defeating flaws. In another decade, we could stop seeing tacky, garish signage for what it is, allowing it to creep into more and more neighbourhoods unannounced, but unopposed.

It is happening on Eastern Road and must be stopped. For two miles or more, there is a lovely stretch of road with mature trees, including guineppes, sapodilla, royal Poinciana, mahogany, a treasure trove of natural fauna and foliage, and then there is the Fox Hill Street corner that has recently changed the nature of the drive. A huge telecom billboard shouts and touts its TV service. Several smaller signs are tacked to a utility pole. A few doors east, two large banners advertising dog and cat food are thrown over a hedge next to a small convenience store, the only commercial enterprise on Eastern Road.

The Department of Physical Planning which falls under the Ministry of Works has responsibility for signage. What would it take to remove all those signs and restore the drive before the lack of sensitivity becomes contagious? There are rules about permitting signs and enforcement is possible with dated permits on signs themselves. To the best of my recollection event signs are allowed to be erected two weeks prior to an event and must be removed within seven days after the event. How many times have we all seen signs about events of years past with the worn and torn banner still flapping in the air or hanging off a pole?

Signage has its place and, in fact, Nassau is shy of the right kind of signage – plaques on historic buildings, better directional signage that includes the number of miles to the airport, for instance, from the highway turn-off as you head west where Thompson Boulevard meets the airport road. We badly need more street signs and we have an opportunity to make them distinctly Bahamian, securing them well enough to avoid making them souvenir material.

Beautification is often expensive. Preventing uglification is far easier. In signage, size does matter and what we see every day impacts how we feel about the world around us. If what we see is attractive, clean, neat, pleasing to the eye, we are more peaceful and care more about our immediate environment. When we care about something, we take better care of it. It is so simple. Why do we make it so hard on ourselves to do the right thing? Clean up the signage, please, and I promise not to use the world uglification again.