Encouraging signs

A sign, serving its humble purpose! Success!

Two-thirds of the signs I illustrated for Old Sacramento have been installed. Hoo! Ray!

The signs went up at Pioneer Park (right) and at the Lauriet Assay Office. I know you join me in anxious vigil for the Waterfront Park signs to appear. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Seeing the signs for the first time last week, I did three things:

1. Wiped off pollen and smudges with my shirttail,
2. Wondered morbidly when someone would deface them, and
3. Realized they are awash in a great ocean of signs in Old Sacramento; so many signs, each so different from the next, you'd think they're what holds up the buildings.

Named for a bakery … that occupied
the site next door.

These new signs are necessarily understated, a dark chocolate on a cream background, designed by Lisa Park to blend in to the 19th Century surroundings, and then become visible to provide handy information the moment visitors wonder what the heck they're looking at.

Though I understand that, I wouldn't mind a little neon, or maybe another sign telling visitors, "Hey! Look at this cool sign!"

As I guide visitors through Underground Sacramento (in the character of an Irish lout-turned-clerk) I tell them with a wink the signs are new and that I'm familiar with the artist's work.

Though the signs are pebbles in a pond, I'm happy knowing they're part of a much larger long-term plan to reveal more of the lunatic history of Sacramento, in which founders built too close to the Sacramento and American rivers, and solved the problem of their own making by lifting the city out of the floodwaters.

A good place for a sign answering,
"What the heck is this?"

Eventually, as The Sacramento Bee reports, the state would like to re-establish two levels of the city in what seems like an empty lawn at Front and I streets in the heart of the old city — the 1849 level of the city, where foundations are still intact, and the post-1864 city level, some 20 feet above.

I'm hoping sooner than later, and that the economy turns around to make it so.