Over A Century of Wayfinding and Typography, Catalogued.

For more than 70 years now, white rectangles with a bold black street name and rounded border have marked San Francisco’s intersections with a unique personality. These were not the only signs the city has had, and even this familiar style has undergone several revisions.

There have been roughly three eras of street signage in the city by the bay: the pre-automobile era, which featured a wildly inconsistent and much-complained-about mess through the 1800s and early 1900s. Then came a few decades of good standard blue porcelain signs (1920s to late 1940s). And finally the signature black-on-white that appeared in the 1940s and is still with us today.

San Francisco as surveyed in 1853, the year of the first street sign ordinance. Map: U.S. Coast Survey (detail) — San Francisco as surveyed in 1853, the year of the first street sign ordinance. *Map: U.S. Coast Survey (detail)*

A nineteenth-century grab-bag (1853–1921)

The first street signage was authorized by ordinance in 1853 by the city Aldermen (forerunners of today’s Board of Supervisors). San Francisco was a town of fewer than 40,000 people; Portsmouth Square was the center of the settlement and only the built-up area was included in the ordinance. There weren’t very many intersections to worry about.

Most people living in cities this small already knew what the streets were, or didn’t care. And you could always slow your horse-drawn buggy to ask someone if you were lost. International tourism was not a consideration.

In the pre-automobile era, there was just no need for high-visibility, high-speed wayfinding. Street signs, to the extent they existed, were generally mounted to the buildings that happened to sit on corner lots.

Here is an early photograph showing the building at the corner of Montgomery and Clay streets in 1859. If you zoom in real real close, you can just make out a tiny sign for “Montgomery St.” mounted some 20 feet off the ground in small lettering:

Montgomery at Clay, 1859. Photo: Library of Congress. — Montgomery at Clay, 1859. *Photo: Library of Congress*.

These early efforts did not suffice for long, as the city was sprawling quickly. The legislators pawned off the problem to property owners with a half-hearted new policy in 1883: all owners of real estate on the corners at intersections were required to “erect and maintain at their own cost and expense, street guides.”

This was as ineffective as it sounds; reporting later confirmed that “no effort has ever been made to enforce the law, and as a consequence, few have taken the trouble to display the information.”

The decades that followed saw complaints about wayfinding addressed with patchwork attempts by the city and others. Gas companies, which provided the street lighting of the late 1800s and into the 1900s, would paint the names of streets in black on the lamp glass at corners. In 1895, this format was upgraded in many locations to “flaming red” text on black background. The gas lamppost signs were criticized for being hard to read from their reverse side, and these lampposts were in any case limited to the “older and settled” portions of the city. The outlying and rural areas of the growing town had no such conveniences.

Different styles of gaslamp street signage. Left, Dupont (now Grant) and Jackson, 1880s. Right, 4th and Jessie, in the aftermath of the 1906 quake. Photos: OpenSFHistory/wnp37.10020.jpg (left, detail), OpenSFHistory/wnp15.181.jpg (right, detail). — Different styles of gaslamp street signage. Left, Dupont (now Grant) and Jackson, 1880s. Right, 4th and Jessie, in the aftermath of the 1906 quake. *Photos:* *OpenSFHistory/wnp37.10020.jpg* *(left, detail),* *OpenSFHistory/wnp15.181.jpg* *(right, detail).*

In the late 1890s the downtown business district got a fresh set of “artistic” corner signs, this time designed and paid for by the city. These were said to be 36" x 8" in size, maroon and silver in color. Some controversy arose because the expenditure had not been authorized in advance and one of those corners benefitting from taxpayer largesse was the Phelan Building owned by (and named for)... then-mayor James Phelan.

The city’s Light Inspector took two months in the summer of 1902 to canvass the city, identifying 1,423 corners with no street signage at all. Inspector Tupper related that “in many instances, people living in their immediate neighborhood could not tell him the name of the street they were living upon.” The record suggests various false starts at signage made in the subsequent years without reaching critical mass.

Meanwhile, street names were often carved into the corners of commercial buildings downtown during the post-earthquake reconstruction as a practical design element. Many of these remain. Here’s an especially charming 1908 example at the corner of Grant and Ashburton (a private alley):

The rise of the motorist in America’s cities resulted in the new academic field of “traffic engineering,” concerned with (among other things) best practices for legibility, durability, and cost-effectiveness of wayfinding devices. It would no longer be sufficient to rely on a potpourri of bespoke lettering affixed to random objects.

The problem came to a head with the looming 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition World’s Fair. Soon to be beset by confused visitors trying to get around on foot, as well as the new breed of road-tripping tourists, San Francisco residents and improvement groups were clamoring for a solution.

City Engineer M. M. O’Shaughnessy agreed that one was wanting: “The lack of proper street signs in a city of this size is unquestionably a distinct business loss. Of course, we cannot expect to make a great showing with $2,500, but the sooner we begin work the better it will be.”

The program that emerged at this time used brown enameled iron plates bearing street names in white, held in metal frames and affixed to electric streetlights on corners downtown. It’s unlikely this design spread very far, but it’s starting to look like what we expect from street signage.

A very fun experimental idea using backlit electric signs embedded within curb concrete was reported on, but is unlikely to have been ever implemented. They should do this one now!

Fancy! (And perhaps fanciful?) Illustration: “Popular Mechanics,” November 1915. — Fancy! (And perhaps fanciful?) *Illustration: “Popular Mechanics,” November 1915.*

Engineer O’Shaughnessy tried again in late 1919 with the first of the modern corner street signs: crossed, double-sided rectangular plates legible from all directions, mounted on their own dedicated pole at the corner. These ones used black lettering on yellow enameled plates. History does not record a broad deployment.

Then 1921 rolls around and budget, design, and political will finally align. Seventy years after becoming the hub of the American West coast, San Francisco gets serious about its street signs.

Blue Enameled Signs, Citywide (1921–late 1940s)

“Convenient and understandable street signs in San Francisco have been a matter that has been agitated by civic organizations and automobile clubs for a long time, and when all the signs are installed, it is expected that the streets of this city will be marked as conveniently and thoroughly as those of any metropolis in the country.”
— San Francisco Chronicle, September 20, 1921

Having apparently abandoned the black-on-yellow project without fanfare after only 18 months, long-suffering engineer O’Shaughnessy took up a fresh design, using metal holder frames to mount enameled steel plates (about 22" x 5" in size). They were deep blue in color with bold white text. The first prototype went up in September 1921 at Market and Larkin on a 10-foot pole, and the city committed to appropriating $7,500 each year to proceed outwards from downtown until the whole city was — at long last — signposted. The blanketing of downtown began in earnest that December 19th, and four hundred were up in a month.

Department of Public Works Sign Shop, 1926. *Photo:* *OpenSFHistory/wnp36.04111*

There are plenty enough surviving sign plates from this era to speak to their typography: but then there’s not very much to say. The lettering was 3" tall, all-straight-lines-no-curves, a simple set of forms with different widths used depending on how long the text was. This style appeared on other wayfinding of the era, including signs put up by the California State Automobile Association. The letters were not painted on, but were instead formed from the negative spaces where the blue enamel had been masked off, exposing the white enamel layer below.

As with the earlier street sign efforts, the type of street (St, Ave, etc) was included on the sign, and many numbered streets were spelled out in full (e.g. “Sixteenth St.”).

San Francisco filled out its 7x7 mile area in the decades leading up to and through the Second World War, and the blue enamel signs went along for the ride. It wasn’t until afterwards that the city determined that further improvements were warranted.

Black-on-White Icons (1940s-present)

By the middle of the 1940s, the hegemony of the American motorist had become cemented in urban thinking and planning. This was the decade in which mass urban freeways across the country were conceived, and it was in that milieu that San Francisco decided it needed yet more legible street signs.

The literal horse and buggy days were still recent enough in memory that the blue signs felt (unfairly!) grounded in that era. Supervisor Marvin Lewis prompted the redesign program in May of 1946. The design was done by the Traffic Engineering Section of the city’s Engineering Bureau, and after some iteration resulted in:

4" tall lettering, embossed for contrast. (Visibility using flat surfaces was considered poor when light reflected at an angle.) The street types were dropped from the the signage (i.e. “OAK STREET” became just “OAK”) except in cases of ambiguity, like a numbered street vs. an avenue, for example.
A larger, 33"x7" enameled steel plate. The porcelain enamel material was understood to resist the corrosion of salty sea air, and so was retained from the earlier designs.
High-visibilty black-on-white color scheme. The white was enameled and the black was painted on the embossed portions.
Rounded corners on the plate and a rounded-rectangle embossed black border around the edges suggest an intentional design echo of the older sign holder frames, but in retrospect turned out to be a notable design element of their own.
For the first time, block numbers were added, using smaller 12" x 4½" plates mounted above the street name. These were useful navigation aids, and having a separate component for them made mass production and replacement simpler.

The design was validated in two newly-developed tract neighborhoods, and the first public replacements were put up on Golden Gate Ave between Leavenworth and Larkin in early November of 1946. Soon the program was rolling out across the city, replacing the blue enamel signs. These embossed signs were the archetype for—and most graphically satisfying of— all the variations to follow.

The 4" lettering on the white signs initially used a somewhat modified version of the chunky style in the (deep breath) Manual and Specifications for the Manufacture, Display, and Erection of U. S. Standard Road Markers and Signs of 1927. That manual was in force as a standard until the 1940s. These letters had much of the blockiness of their forbears but used curves on their natural corners for a sleeker chunky look. There were at least four widths of the font used, depending on the space available. The most dramatic of these has essentially square characters, as seen above in the “SCOTT” sign.

Finding no other name for this locally-modified variant of the 1927 road manual lettering, this author has christened the typeface “Fog City Gothic” and created a digital version of the larger two widths that stays true to the feel of the embossed, painted text. You can obtain these fonts from this very website in fact!

This chunky style was basically obsolete as soon as it came into use, though, because at about the time the new black-on-white street signs were rolling through San Francisco, the U. S. Public Roads Administration published an updated Standard Alphabets for Highway Signs. This was a landmark document which detailed the sans-serif road sign typography still in use across the country today. This lettering is known informally as “Highway Gothic.”

Detail of a page from the 1952 “Highway Gothic” standard alphabet, Series E, with precise dimensions marked out. Image: U.S. Department of Commerce — Detail of a page from the 1952 “Highway Gothic” standard alphabet, Series E, with precise dimensions marked out. *Image: U.S. Department of Commerce*

Soon after, San Francisco updated to match. By the early 1950s, the city sign shop stopped stamping the chunkier style and adopted all-caps Highway Gothic for new and replacement signage. Designed as a drop-in replacement for the earlier lettering, the new font featured multiple, compatible width options (called “series,” designated A to F).

The story from that time to the present is one of variations on a theme, with perhaps a somewhat gentle decline in design coherence. The heavy enameled, embossed signs were discontinued in favor of flat aluminum painted or reflective plates by the 1970s. They were also enlarged slightly, to 36”x8”. Lettering and border material varied to include stick-on adhesive. In the 21st century, a new 3M reflective background material was incorporated.

The typography itself had remained the same all-caps style for 60 years, but in 2009 the city adopted the findings of the Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which dictated that mixed-case signage was easier to read. There is some evidence that we made a bargain with the feds: we got to keep the classic color scheme (black on white) which is now frowned upon, in return for agreeing to implement mixed case. New street signs produced and replaced since about 2012 have included lower case letters.

The decision—whether by choice or by force—to adopt mixed-case typography while using the same typeface was unfortunate. Most obviously it makes a hash of the graphic design integrity of San Francisco’s unique and bold street sign legacy. Plus, the constraints of the classic rectangle form mean the resulting lowercase letters are too small, often kerned out to oblivion, and are less readable overall.

Mixed-case is very functional on large signs with many words of text, but there’s no way the new San Francisco style is more legible from a block away than the classic one.

Who wore it better? (Hint: the one on the right is a typographic abomination.) — Who wore it better? (Hint: the one on the right is n o t g r e a t.)

Fortunately, the city has not undertaken a comprehensive sign update program since 1950, and the SFMTA only replaces street signs as needed. So you can find nearly all of the black-on-white variants still in use around the city, easily spotted by walking a few blocks along any street. (The iconic embossed enamel signs eventually rusted beyond usefulness in the field. A small handful of examples were still mounted on poles as of about 2010, and it’s possible one or two are still out there hiding in plain sight.)

As with the (less common) blue signs, you can find decommissioned white signs, including embossed ones, mounted to the sides of buildings at corners, given to (or sold to) the building owner by the city at some point.

It remains this author’s hope that San Francisco will one day find a way to and re-embrace its original signature design legacy, resurrecting the all-caps embossed lettering and rounded corners of the midcentury heyday.

Thanks to the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the San Francisco Public Library, and David Gallagher at the Western Neighborhoods Project for assistance with research in the time of Covid. Thanks also to Erica Fischer for her posts, photos, and tweets; many times I thought I’d uncovered something new, only to find that Erica had already noticed it. (If I’ve done my job, there will be at least one tidbit here that’s new to her, and if you’re not Erica, hopefully many such new tidbits.)

Selected Resources

“Ordinance Number 468,” Ordinances and Joint Resolutions of the City of San Francisco 1852–54.
“Red-Lettered Lamps,” San Francisco Call, February 15, 1895.
“Need Street Signs,” San Francisco Examiner, July 17, 1896.
“Corner Signs Cause Trouble,” San Francisco Call, January 5, 1898.
“Broderick and Those Signs,” San Francisco Call, January 11, 1898.
“Many Corners Without Street Signs,” San Francisco Call, August 21, 1902.
“Merchants Ask For More Signs,” San Francisco Call, April 18, 1905.
“Street Signs A Necessity,” San Francisco Examiner, January 14, 1914.
“Bulletin 20: Street-Name Signs,” Engineering Extension Department Technical Service, Iowa State College, March 10, 1916.
“New San Francisco Street Signs,” Municipal Journal & Public Works, Vol. 47, №20, November 15, 1919.
“New Street Sign System in S.F. Inagurated,” San Francisco Call, February 7, 1920.
“$50,000 Voted For Start On Street Sign Work,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 1921.
“First of New Street Sign Type Appears,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 20, 1921.
“Manual and Specifications for the Manufacture, Display, and Erection of U. S. Standard Road Markers and Signs(First Edition)”, Amercian Association of State Highway Officials, 1927.
“New Street Sign Tried Out Here,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, Nov 2, 1946.
“San Francisco’s New Street Signs,” George Purser, in Traffic Engineering, Sept 1950.
“Standard Alphabets for Highway Signs,” Department of Commerce, Bureau of Public Roads, 1952.
“San Francisco Street Sign History,” Erica Fischer, August 26, 2007.
“Celebrity status follows couple home to Kansas,” C. W. Nevius, SFGate.com, June 12, 2012.
“Reconstruction of square US standard road sign lettering (1927),” Erica Fischer via Flickr, 2012.

San Francisco City Engineer Michael M. “Stone Cold” O’Shaughnessy

A FIELD GUIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO’S ICONIC STREET SIGNS

A nineteenth-century grab-bag (1853–1921)

Blue Enameled Signs, Citywide (1921–late 1940s)

Black-on-White Icons (1940s-present)

Selected Resources