new york glimpses: written city

For an amateur type-geek, New York is a veritable specimen book of fantastically quirky found signage and lettering. There are literally entire city-blocks worth of hand-lettered signs, molded plastic type, painted announcements, and bizarrely expressive awnings. If it weren't for my overwhelming fear of looking like a tourist, I would have been walking the streets with my camera out, wildly snapping photos of every storefront we passed.

I did still manage to take a few pictures of some of the awesome vernacular type I saw on our trip, mostly in Coney Island. To be honest, that was my main impulse for heading down to the boardwalk; Coney is like a musty old collector's basement full of ephemera. The beachfront is a collision of arcade neon and hand-painted, hyperbolic side-show banners. And it sadly won't be around for much longer before it begins to look like an Atlantic City resort. I try to imagine if Coney ever looked classy, or if it always just felt like a bit of working class exoticism. Either way, it has a uniquely nostalgic feeling that I hope they can preserve.

On that note, here's a little photographic interlude between our food-fueled travel stories:



If this slideshow was a little heavy on design and a bit light on edibles, you can always see the rest of our photos here.