American Sign Museum facts for kids
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| Established | 1999 |
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| Location | 1330 Monmouth Street Cincinnati, Ohio |
| Type | Collection museum |
The American Sign Museum is a fun and colorful museum located in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's a special place that collects and shows off all kinds of signs from many different years. The museum is like a time machine, letting you see how signs have changed over the last century. It also displays the tools and equipment used to make these amazing signs. The museum was started by Tod Swormstedt in 1999 and first opened its doors in 2005.
The Story Behind the Museum
The idea for the American Sign Museum came from Tod Swormstedt. His family has been involved with signs for a very long time. They own a magazine for the sign-making industry called Signs of the Times, which started all the way back in 1906.
After working at the magazine for more than 20 years, Tod was inspired to create a museum dedicated to signs. He wanted to save and share the history and art of sign-making. His family and others in the sign industry helped support his idea. He decided to build the museum in Cincinnati, which was the home base for his family's magazine.
A Look at the Coolest Signs
The museum has a huge collection of signs and other items. There are over 200 signs on display, but the museum has cataloged more than 3,800 items in total! The collection features signs from the late 1800s all the way to the 1970s.
Some of the most popular signs include:
- Beautiful lettering made with real gold leaf on glass windows.
- A giant plastic ball that looks like the Sputnik satellite, which once hung outside a shopping center in Anaheim, California.
- A spinning neon windmill from a donut shop in Denver.
- A huge, 20-foot-tall fiberglass genie that used to welcome customers to a carpet store in Los Angeles.
- A classic statue of Frisch's Big Boy. This older version of the statue has a slingshot in his back pocket, which was removed from later models.
The museum also has signs from famous old businesses like Howard Johnson's and Big Bear Stores. In 2008, the museum got a very rare 1963 McDonald's sign. This sign features a character named "Speedee," who was the McDonald's mascot before Ronald McDonald became famous.
Getting Bigger and Better
As the museum collected more signs, it quickly ran out of room. Many of the signs were simply too big to fit inside the original building. To solve this problem, the museum moved to a much larger location in 2012.
The new building is a historic factory in a Cincinnati neighborhood called Camp Washington. This new space is large enough to display about 500 signs and artifacts. Many of the signs are arranged along a pretend street called "Signville," which makes you feel like you're walking through a town from the past.
The new location also has a working neon sign shop called Neonworks of Cincinnati. Visitors can watch experts as they bend glass tubes and fill them with gas to create glowing neon signs. It's a live demonstration of how these bright and colorful signs are made and restored.
See also
- Neon Museum at the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas
