Letters at an Exposition: Signage of the York Interstate Fair

The York Interstate Fair has been held at the same fairgrounds since 1888. I am a member of one of the scores of generations of native Yorkers whose attendance at the fair was a yearly event as a kid. You could win a goldfish, eat a walk-away sundae, buy a live chameleon on a leash, smell an entire bushel of onions frying, and see parts of a male sheep that made you blush, all in the matter of an hour. There were 500 pound pumpkins, bingo parlors, whiplash-producing rides, and of course the requisite sword eating man and two-headed baby. Any of us who had the slightest bent toward eccentricity carried these impressions with us into adulthood.

Today, the fair is not what it used to be. It is less agricultural, more commercial, more electronic, and way sleazier. In other words, it's more like everyday life in the United States. The beautiful, old open-air livestock exhibition pavilions have been torn down, and replaced by a huge state-of-the-art climate-controlled hall. Now the pigs and sheep have air conditioning and cable TV while they wait to make their debuts into the judging arena. The stand where the Fireman's Association raffled off galvanized buckets full of groceries is gone. People won't buy a ticket for less than a plasma TV these days.

After being away for years, I attended the exposition one Sunday morning, cameras in hand, with the intention of capturing what was left of the magic I remembered as a kid. I realized that much of that magic had to do with letters. As I walked around, I realized that the ratio of hand created lettering to that made by machine was far greater than in my normal environment. As a lover of letters, this was exciting.

There isn't much of the original agricultural fair signage left, because most of the buildings it was on are gone. However, one of the buildings I remember is the public restroom, where the signage is the same as the first time I saw it, sans serif, bold and redundant. (1) Many newer structures, trailers and placards call forth the old fashioned forms, ornate Tuscans with dramatic drop shadows, not the “Photoshoppy” kind, (2) and massive slab serifs (3) hawking everything from funnel cakes to tattoos. There are stars, bursts, decorative borders, type that is forced to fit the space (4) (and not through horizontal scaling), and oddly custom swashes.

Expert hand painting of lettering with a brush is a dying art. Before the digital age, most stores advertised sales and specials with posters lettered with brushes, both wire and hair, and inks and tempera. There was a timeliness, urgency and streamlined quality to the forms, as the signage was typically created weekly. There was plenty of work out there for placard artists, whose lettering abilities were so innate their brushes were an extension of their arms. Flowing obliques, exuberant scale and precision letterspacing are the hallmarks of this kind of work. The masterful subtlety of thicks and thins, fluid stresses, and effervescent accents just isn't the same in Illustrator.(5)

And there are many different configurations and substrates. Flat signs that are freestanding, some behind glass, others with lights around them, and some that mix lettering and ornamentation. There is airbrush, chalk, marker, enamel and vinyl on all manner of surfaces from concrete to plastic. There is signage that has to do with navigation and regulations, the quest for exciting food, rides and games, and promoting the perennial evangelical factions.

Food signage frequently contains letterforms that are urgently obliqued and have a dynamic relationship to the illustrations of tasty treats they advertise. These forms almost lead the reader to believe that mozzarella sticks are not as fat-laden as one might think. Circus and freak show banners have become highly collectable examples of American visual history, and there are fewer and fewer of the original pieces visible today. Painted on canvas, rolled and shipped from one exposition to another, the typography was masterful in its expert spacing, undulating baselines and urgent bursts and bubbles. I noticed a new generation of midway signage at this fair, and, while certainly fun to look at, it doesn't have near the finesse, craft and restraint of the traditional genre. (6) The colors are brighter and the letterforms are more contrived and less skillfully executed.

One of the things that is so central to fair graphics is the tendency to emphasize everything, which, of course, deemphasizes everything. There is a dizzying, short-attention span kind of sensation when in this environment, which is one of the main things that has qualified the fair as entertainment for decades. There was a time when ornateness, scale and saturation were visual vacations for most people, whose lives did not include TV, mountains of direct mail and Gameboy. It is less entertaining now, since people are more physiologically attuned to visual overstimulation. Sight and sound bites, lights, flashing, size, color and movement are common in the consciousness of the normal person.

The juxtaposition of savvy brushwork and amateur scribbling is fascinating. Vendors do what has to be done with what they have, like the addendum to an existing sign scrawled in marker on a paper plate and affixed with packing tape, or the painted warning on a post next to a container of hot coffee (7). But not all of this “outsider” form is lacking in aesthetics or communicative intention. An amazing amount of content was well organized onto a marker board, complete with connotative curls in the words “Spiral Spuds”. Someone exercised a great amount of patience in the painting of a list of ice cream offerings in a consistent sans serif on a corrugated aluminum trailer. This pioneering typographic spirit adds to the fair's atmosphere and charm.

There is a wonderful sincerity and genuineness about these hand crafted signs, even if most of them are urging me to believe the unbelievable. The festive, circus-like forms and decorative elements convince me that seeing the perfectly pink elephant-nosed pig (8) is going to be an experience I won't soon forget. Somehow, I don't get the same impression from a rotary board about a sale at Sears. Because of the streamlined brushwork on his trailer, I just know that Donnie's French fries will be far fresher and tastier than Mickey D's, and possibly even served up by Donnie himself. An environment where there is as much hand lettering as the York Interstate Fair, provides a very interactive experience. The reader is compelled to take a leap of faith, to taste, to buy, to view, to believe, largely because another human being's hand made the mark that conveys the message. It's a testimonial of sorts. This differs radically from the experience of being in a strange place and seeing a sign for Red Lobster. The sign looks exactly like the one in your hometown, large, electrified and manufactured. Thanks to a huge corporation, the reader is relieved of the burden of dealing with any kind of meaningful interaction with the experience of finding something to eat that is indigenous or memorable.

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