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A pair of museum employees hold the sign from the top, and their heads duck and shoulders dip as they both descend the stairs. The sign—so large and so heavy that it had to be split into 13 different pieces to be properly transported and stored—is turned upside down, flipped horizontally and angled. It’s held from the top, the bottom and the sides. Each step down is a silent negotiation with each other, gravity, friction and fate.
Outside of general comments like “please be careful” and “watch your step,” there’s little conversation. They just move, improvise and force the sign through the cellar doors, inch by stubborn inch.
We take this route—go outside the main entrance, down the basement stairs, walk through the basement, up the back basement steps, and walk through the side doors back into the main room where we started—10 times just to relocate one sign.
The 40-foot Louis Zuflacht sign was removed from the iconic retail shop at 154 Stanton Street a few days earlier and relocated into the Brooklyn basement of the New York Sign Museum—there simply wasn’t enough space on the main floor. Still, the basement was a far better fate than the dumpster.
One day, when Mac Pohanka, the cofounder of sign design studio Noble Signs, was walking home from work, he saw one of his neighborhood business signs being thrown in the trash and thought that if no one was going to save these signs, he should. He ran the idea by his friend and roommate, David Barnett, the other cofounder, and they reasoned, “If we’re going to try and make signs that look like the old signs, the best way to do it is to get up close and study them.” The business-driven collection quickly snowballed into a museum from there.
Inhabiting the corner of Van Sinderen and Atlantic Avenue in Ocean Hill, the New York Sign Museum (NYSM) was started in 2019 to “preserve the unique history of signage and businesses in New York City.” The nonprofit was founded by Barnett and Pohanka and shares the same space as their Noble Signs workshop.
In order to tour the museum, you have to book a reservation through the NYSM Eventbrite page. The price varies between $28 and $35, with tours held weekly on Fridays and occasionally on Sundays; check the ticketing page for the full schedule.
When you walk into a typical art museum, you’re met with cool glossed cement floors and art behind glass with guards watching so museum goers don’t touch or damage the art. Everyone follows a general museum etiquette: speaking in hushed tones, taking pictures without the flash, walking not running.
That’s not the case here. During museum tours, museumgoers are permitted to touch the signs and take as many pictures with flash as they please. Unlike most art that’s stored in museums, these signs aren’t precious since they’re made with materials that are meant to withstand harsh weather conditions and the wear of everyday life.
Since Noble Signs and the NYSM occupy the same space, you unintentionally get a glimpse into a working sign shop where the same styles of signs displayed on the walls are actively being made.
At Noble Signs, Pohanka and Barnett both design and fabricate. As they put it: Fusing “art, contemporary design and technology with time-honored techniques—including hand-painting, gold leaf and neon—Noble bridges the heritage of the art form into the present.”
The museum occupies two floors—entry to the first requires ascending a small step, while access to the second floor is via a full two-flight staircase. The wooden floor is covered in sawdust and paint splatters. There’s metal tubing and paneling sticking out of a makeshift storage shelf. The Scher’s delicatessen sign rests on the same table with a DeWalt 12-inch saw.
And most importantly, there are iconic signs—like the neon Smith Bar sign and the Queen Italian Restaurant sign—everywhere. A cement company’s sign hangs next to a cobbler’s sign next to an electronics sign. A top sign (a large, prominent sign mounted at the top of a storefront) hangs next to a blade sign (a sign that extends perpendicular from the face of a building) hangs next to a porcelain sign (a durable, vintage sign made from layers of powdered glass fused to a metal base).
Pohanka explained that a sign earns its place in the NYSM if it captures a classic style, reflects a neighborhood’s character or is simply old and well-preserved.
“We would love for the museum to feel like you’re walking through a tutorial of signage throughout the city,” he reiterated.
Discarded signs are still sometimes spontaneously rescued, but now signs make their way to the NYSM in a variety of other ways. Sometimes store owners contact the museum, and vice versa—the museum will reach out to store owners if they hear the shop is shutting down. Other times fellow sign lovers will give them a heads up on specific ones that are soon to be discarded.
The upstairs area showcases books on typesetting and linotyping, along with other typography artifacts that are either out of print or hard to come by. For anyone curious about how printed materials were created before the digital age, this collection offers hands-on access to tools and texts.
Because the sign fabrication industry is mostly based on word-of-mouth, being able to see and study these original materials provides a deeper understanding of the physical processes behind typography from metal type to layout techniques, and gives context to how modern design practices evolved.
It’s not just a display; it’s a learning environment rooted in the tactile and technical traditions of printing.
Whether it’s explanations to out-of-the-box questions, like explaining how the Zuflacht was made—they guess it’s from a proprietary product that was baked instead of ironed on—or casual conversations had over the wooden workbench, it’s evident that the people behind this museum are not only knowledgeable but also take pride in preserving these pieces of history.
As tour guide Seamus explained on my walk through the museum, “We want to become not just a place to navel-gaze and wax nostalgic about NYC, but to become a place where you can really focus on the design of the signs and preserve it while teaching and inspiring others to design from it.”
The New York Sign Museum is located at 2465 Atlantic Avenue in Ocean Hill in Brooklyn. Tours ($28–$35) are offered on Friday afternoons and occasionally on Sundays.