Amaya Nichole

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. Photograph: Amaya Nichole for Time Out 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, D