Signs of the Times
A new Cincinnati museum seeks to pay overdue tribute to an urban legacy

By Felix Winternitz

Tod Swormstedt is seeing signs. Lots of them.

Not like in the Mel Gibson shock movie thriller, but real honest-to-goodness signs: Streetcorner signs, shop signs, urban billboards, even fast-food icons.
Swormstedt is in the process of getting ready to open Cincinnati’s newest cultural attraction, the American Sign Museum, and he’s noticeably excited.

Photo:Jon Hughes/photopresse Tod Swormstedt is looking for a sign, any sign, that visitors will flock to his new American Sign Museum in Walnut Hills.

“I just got my hands on an early McDonald’s ‘Speedy’sign, featuring a guy they called Speedy,” he says. “If we didn’t have an early McDonald’s sign, it would have been a big void to overcome. It’s such an icon.”

The Cincinnati native’s audacious concept for his American Sign Museum will require lofty exhibition space, and he’s found that space at a warehouse in Walnut Hills. Swormstedt, who already owns all the signs he’d want to display, envisions opening the museum by the end of the year.

“We have, for instance, a ‘Holiday Inn: The World’s Innkeeper’ sign, one of the great ones, with the arrow and chasing lights,” he notes.

Some of the signs and roadside Americana in his collection include pre-neon electric signs, neon signs, gasoline station logos, signshop signs, salesmen’s sign kits, tavern and inn signs, drug store signage and diner and roadside restaurant commercial art displays.

View the collection — which spans 1880 to the present — and you begin to imagine the possibilities. Pass by a hand-painted tin sign with push-through embossed opal glass text. Check out a Chicago dry cleaner’s shop window sign that’s a neon clock. Move on to a countertop “shoe repair” sign that’s an illuminated plastic panel.

Rounding out Swormstedt’s collection is an early “neon” fluorescent menuboard, a glass chemist’s sign circa 1910, an incandescent Cole Batteries sign circa 1920, a flip-ad neon clock circa 1950, a Frank Sinatra showcard from Las Vegas circa 1960, a 1910 Goodyear sign, a 1960 neon rooftop Gulf sign, an Elgin Watch countertop display (a three-dimensional unit featuring a motorized plastic vintage car) and “paper” items such as catalogs, books, blueprints and sign sketches.

Swormstedt comes by his love of signs honestly. He’s a member of the family that owns the century-old Cincinnati company ST Media Group, which is publisher of the nation’s largest trade pub devoted to the commercial sign industry, the 96-year-old Signs of the Times Magazine. (ST, for its part, has donated a “substantial” amount of seed money to the museum project.)

For decades, the Swormstedts have been collecting signs. Thousands of ’em — rare and collectible placards, vintage posters, historically significant banners, roadside Americana, pop art and pop culture kitsch. Swormstedt says this museum is devoted to nothing less than preserving and chronicling “the front line of advertising.”

If you ask “Why in Cincinnati?” Swormstedt’s rapid-fire response is “Why not Cincinnati?” The city is home to Procter & Gamble, the largest commercial advertiser in the world. Home to dozens of turn-of-the-century signmakers, billboard artists, poster printing companies and manufacturers of sign-related objects. And, not incidentally, home to Signs of the Times, located downtown at Gilbert Avenue and Broadway.
The tale of how Swormstedt’s private collection evolved into a campaign for a new museum begins simply enough.

Photo:Jon Hughes/photopresse

“I was having a midlife crisis,” he says of his work at Signs of the Times, where his grandfather and dad worked and where his brother and two cousins currently are employed. “I’m still on the payroll, but my focus is the museum.”

Hot on the success of other cities launching special-interest museums — the International Spy Museum, Holocaust Museum and The Newseum in the nation’s capitol, for instance — Swormstedt is adamant this can work.

“On the inside of the building, we want to put signs in architectural context,” he says, describing his plan with unbridled enthusiasm. He envisions period storefronts lining nostalgic streets. “We’d like to put the 1920s signs, for instance, on a 1920s Main Street, and progress — almost like a timeline — as visitors move toward the 1960s.”
The collection began, and prospered, simply as a byproduct of Swormstedt’s magazine work.

“I was not originally aware of the network of collectors in antique signs,” says Swormstedt, who now sits on the board of the national Society for Commercial Archaeology. “It’s a big network of collectors, and some big money is being spent. Just watch on eBay. There are whole sections on porcelain, neon and vintage signs. Some signs are fetching up to $10,000 each, which is the good news and the bad news. It means there’s definitely an interest, but it’s going to be hard for me to get (any more of) this stuff for free.”

More and more, too, he has to be careful of the swindlers.

“There’s a lot of counterfeit signs,” he says. “There are all these Burma Shave signs, fakes, sitting around in antique shops. That began about 20 years ago, when those signs really became popular.”

Swormstedt is amazed there’s no current public archive or public collection of signs already in existence.

“There is a neon museum in Las Vegas, but they concentrate only on (preserving) neon signs within the city limits of Las Vegas,” he says.

As Swormstedt views it, the American Sign Museum will eventually house a sign restoration department, including a working neon plant as well as other fabrication/restoration capabilities.

And, of course, Swormstedt is thrilled to hear from anybody in Greater Cincinnati with nostalgic signs crammed into their garages or attics. Just give him the high sign.

Interested in receiving the American Sign Museum newsletter? Write: American Sign Museum, 407 Gilbert Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45202. Phone: 513-421-2050, ext. 336. Web: www.signmuseum.com