{"id":78083,"date":"2017-11-29T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mellzah.com\/?p=78083"},"modified":"2019-06-20T12:02:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:02:00","slug":"the-american-sign-museum-in-cincinnati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mellzah.com\/index.php\/the-american-sign-museum-in-cincinnati\/","title":{"rendered":"The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I say I’m not the biggest fan of advertisements, and sometimes I even mean it. I consider Times Square to be the closest thing we have to hell on Earth<\/a>, and when I learned that Piccadilly Circus was much the same, I knew what area of town I wouldn’t want to stay in on my trip to London.<\/p>\n

I despise all the billboards on the large road nearest my home, and I especially loathe the digital one that blasts blinding light into the low income apartments across the street. (Seriously guys, this is a suburb, not Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, no one needs an advertisement for a weed whacker blazing into their bedroom window at 4am.)<\/p>\n

I sent a dude packing who wanted to advertise his business in my front yard with not so much as a “good day, sir”. I listen to a lot of NPR because then I don’t have to hear about my “friend in the diamond business” like I would on other radio stations. I have yet to take money from a single business to put any form of ad in front of your eyeballs, beloved readers*.<\/p>\n

But I’m also a shocking hypocrite–stick me in a room with old timey neon lights<\/a> and I go all doe-eyed with delight. And what the hell is my blog even about if not monuments erected as a form of advertisement<\/a>? See? Hypocrite. So it’s really no wonder that when I got to Ohio, I shoved my in-laws into a rental car and dragged everyone to Cincinnati to visit the American Sign Museum.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The American Sign Museum opened in 2005, the brainchild of\u00a0Tod Swormstedt, of the sign industry magazine baron** Swormstedts. Its purpose is to preserve and display (you guessed it) signs, and they must be doing a bang-up job as they outgrew their first location and moved to this new location in 2012. Even at this new location, they’re only displaying a small percentage of their overall collection, and they’re looking to raise the roof and double the museum’s size in the future. I honestly wish I could tell you more, but there isn’t a ton in the way of context in this museum. I can<\/em> tell you that while I was there, they blocked off the whole back room for an interview with\/photoshoot of a Kroger executive, and part of me really, really wanted to play reporter and ask him what those brown lumps were in my brand new non-expired Kroger Brand heavy cream, but a bigger part of me didn’t want to be dragged off the property.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All those signs sure are pretty, though.<\/p>\n

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\"\"You can hardly read it here, but that door purports to lead to “funtown”. Not to judge a funtown by its door, but…run, children. Run.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Every single time I see an indoor faux streetscape, I think of House on the Rock<\/a>. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"\"The fish in the blender is obviously my favorite, because a fish smoothie sounds like a nom or vom<\/a> in the making.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"\"I’m 99.99999% sure that the person in this photo *is* Sign Industry Magazine Baron Tod Swormstedt. I literally was not even going to include this photo in the post until I did a triple-take whilst perusing their website<\/a>. If this was a professional-person blog, this caption would read something like “above: Tod Swormstedt working in his shop at Neonworks of Cincinnati”. If it was indeed Tod Swormstedt. And also if they managed to take a photo that didn’t completely obscure his eyes.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"\"That feels less like an ad, and more like a threat, just saying.<\/em><\/p>\n

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*Not for lack of trying, and I did post that one thing one time but those people got weird and I took it down, not just because they got weird but also because they didn’t pay me, which, to me,\u00a0 feels like a really important part of the whole buying an advertisement scenario.<\/p>\n

**I mean, yes, they own Signs of the Times but I honestly just don’t even know what qualifies one for a non-nobility barony honorific<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I say I’m not the biggest fan of advertisements, and sometimes I even mean it. I consider Times Square to be the closest thing we have to hell on Earth, and when I learned that Piccadilly Circus was much the same, I knew what area of town I wouldn’t want to stay in on my… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":78093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,483,313,102,223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-attractions","category-midwest","category-ohio","category-travel","category-usa"],"yoast_head":"\nThe American Sign Museum in Cincinnati • Mellzah<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mellzah.com\/index.php\/the-american-sign-museum-in-cincinnati\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati • Mellzah\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I say I’m not the biggest fan of advertisements, and sometimes I even mean it. 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