Time was, East Hampton was famous as the anti-signage town. Have you noticed an uptick in signs on our streets in the last year or two? An extra flash of neon here, a plastic banner there, ads for pony camps and paddleboard yoga plunked by the roadside, sandwich boards creeping onto the public right of way?
We have. And, call us cranky curmudgeons, we don’t like it.
We are firm believers that the fewer signs on our streets the better for all.
This editorial isn’t to point the finger of blame on our code-enforcement personnel, who are very busy people and likely have bigger fish to fry. But we thought we’d re-raise the flag on the sign issue, if only because the links of cultural memory weaken as our population booms, our demographics change, and East Hampton becomes ever more urban.
So here’s a hopefully not-too-irksome reminder.
If in 2024 East Hampton is still extolled by travel writers and lifestyle bloggers for its bucolic vistas, it is in no small part because our forefathers — actually, it was our foremothers, primarily, in the form of agitators from the Ladies Village Improvement Society — had the foresight way back in the 1920s to put the kibosh on billboards and honky-tonk commercial signage.
Keeping a lid on commercial signage of all kinds has been a theme of municipal debate, occasionally kooky shenanigans, and civic pride ever since. Every couple of years there are flare-ups in this cultural tussle, which pits so-called business-boosters against the anti-commercialism camp. In the 1940s and 1950s, amusingly in retrospect, pitched battles were fought against summer-stock theater signs, which some felt were lending a tawdry air to Main Street. Anyone who was of voting age in 1993 will remember the wild-eyed tug of war over the red-painted rearing-horse statue at the Red Horse Market, which was accused of being “signage.”
It’s true that the signage regulations can sometimes seem a tad silly. Is a stack of pumpkins “signage”? Was it really “signage” when boutique owners on Newtown hung baskets of geraniums from the awnings in the 1980s? Nevertheless, we believe that keeping a lid on unnecessary signs and monitoring their dimensions has had an outsize and purely positive impact on the beauty and peace of East Hampton.
We think it would behoove various levels of government to refocus on signage scofflaws in this shoulder season, when other code issues may be less pressing.
Meanwhile, it’s crazy season out there when it comes to the petty crimes and misdemeanors of an election year. By which we mean: lawn-sign stealing.
Remember the mini-scandal of 2015, when a 73-year-old Springs resident was caught on a surveillance camera scampering off with the rental-registry-protest-sign nabbed from a neighbor’s driveway? Remember 2012, when the race for East Hampton Town highway superintendent got so heated that a member of one warring camp was similarly caught on camera absconding with an opponent’s sign in Montauk? This behavior is not just ridiculously unethical, it is, in this age of doorbell cameras and iPhone videos, highly ill advised. It’s also technically a misdemeanor. Sign-stealing is petty larceny.
We’ve been amazed to hear that in this presidential election season certain citizens are still getting so overexcited that they lose self-control and take it upon themselves to slink out — sometimes under cover of darkness, sometimes in full daylight — to remove strangers’ and neighbors’ campaign signs.
Don’t do that.
The only good lawn sign, we believe, is a campaign lawn sign, and their proliferation this autumn, like mushrooms, is a sign that democracy lives.