Recycled signs and roadside eyesores

Recycled signs and roadside eyesores

One of the nice things about my part of the world is that we seem to have pretty strict sign ordinances. The kind of visual clutter you will find all over the country generally doesn't happen here.

Still, sometimes there are signs way up high which have been around for a long time. There must be some very specific rules about how much you're allowed to change, since it winds up producing things like this:

Yep, up until a couple of years ago, the topmost sign on this pole was in fact for an Italian restaurant. They apparently went out of business and were replaced by an Indian restaurant... a vegetarian one, at that. I'm guessing they're not allowed to change the outline or height of the sign, but they obviously can change what it says.

And so, you wind up with a huge "boot" of Italy... for an Indian restaurant. I guess that kind of real estate way up high on El Camino Real is worth the potential confusion.

Here's another example from a different part of El Camino. Can you guess what this used to be?

Give up? I'm pretty sure that's an old Pizza Hut sign.

As long as I'm talking about Pizza Hut, here's a weird old one I caught back in 2000 down in Texas. I don't know how this thing managed to stick around so long. The restaurant building itself had the normal (for that time) logo, complete with the droopy double-Z thing which you can see in the outline above.

I suspect that sign is still there. That kind of huge, tall, gaudy thing is exactly what you won't find around here for any new construction and basically any old construction which has replaced their signs.

Without some kind of control on the situation, you end up with this:

It just goes on... and on... and on...