“Madrid would not be Madrid without its commercial signs: ugly, gloomy, cheap, elegant, unintelligible, beautiful, old, funny. Each one, as well as the vanishing shops and storefronts in cities that they have advertised, has made the city a rich place in living stories and anecdotes. We are not willing to lose them for good,” says Paco Graco.
But who is Paco? Is he another citizen longing for the past, incapable of moving forward? Where a mom-and-pop store closes, a new one comes to life, keeping the neighborhood’s local flavor and character. But even in this optimistic scenario, have you ever wondered about the little-known stories behind the signs, and about their gradual disappearance?
Paco, as everyone called him, was, among many other things, a sign-maker by profession. For decades, he manufactured signs for shops in Madrid in his workshop. But he could also have been the owner of a bar that opened 50 years ago and has witnessed decades of economic downturns and social unrest, helping to weave the social fabric of his neighborhood.
Amid the city’s complexity, these hidden stories behind small-scale shops uphold the romantic idea that an urban community or neighborhood is an emotional ecosystem. And their storefronts and idiosyncratic visual imprints are tangible elements that precisely express the vivid voices of that ecosystem.
Madrid’s commercial signs are now a fading part of the cityscape
PACO GRACO in Madrid is one of the grassroots initiatives to safeguard and protect commercial Graphic Heritage in the city. In recent years, commercial signs have been dismantled and demolished as local shops and storefronts have vanished in Spanish cities.
“In Madrid, we have lost five centenary stores already, even before the pandemic, and with them a large part of the commercial signs. When those signs are thrown out, the memory of our city is thrown away. Rather than Graphic Heritage, we tend to call it Common Heritage, built up by the actions of so many citizens, their private stories,” explains Alberto Nanclares, founder of the well-known organization Basurama, but also one of the co-founders of PACO GRACO together with the association Zuloark.
Similarly, many other grassroots movements in Spanish cities are collecting signs and documenting the stories of small businesses for the same purpose. They form a dense surveillance network of neighbors, capable of spontaneously mobilizing citizens to rescue a commercial sign that they detect is being dismantled. In Lisboa, Letreiro Galeria has already rescued more than 250 pieces. Their goal is to create a museum with all the signs, so everyone can enjoy the graphic memory that would otherwise disappear.
“Commercial signs are invisible elements that become visible when they disappear,” claims Federico Barrera, an historian who leads the movement in his hometown, Santander, Spain.
Since February 2020, all grassroots movements have joined efforts to raise awareness of the importance of cities’ commercial signs. They have founded the “Iberian Network in Defense of Graphic Heritage”. “The powerful thing about commercial signs is that they showcase the diversity of a city. At the same time, this mixture of voices collides with the idea of a clean, uniform city. Colorful individual designs portray a chaotic cityscape, which some city administrations find difficult to cope with,” explains Nanclares.
In 2007, the city of São Paulo, Brazil, banned outdoor advertising following the enforcement of the law “Lei Cidade Limpa” (Portuguese for Clean City Law). Billboards were taken down, and, ironically, the campaign received strong public support. At that time, the city’s mayor, Gilberto Kassab, claimed that “The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution … pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”
“But they pay a higher price. The city became silent,” says Nanclares.
“By rescuing the signs in cities, we don’t aim at freezing the city and hampering its dynamism. On the contrary, we endeavor to keep its diversity by raising awareness of the immaterial value of mom-and-pop shops and bars in neighborhoods. Their signs are just the witness, in their many forms and designs, of our collective memory, of the non-written micro-history of the city.”
“A commercial sign is the thread to pull to recall the social and economic memory of a particular neighborhood. We support local commerce because it creates social networks and is the economic axis of the street,” explains Barrera. In Santander, at the end of the 19th century, an explosion destroyed a significant part of the port. In 1941, a fire destroyed downtown. These were two catastrophes in a very short time period with significant social implications for the city. Many businesses had to relocate to survive, first to barracks. Then the neighbors came to the rescue, allowing business owners to establish themselves in the hallways of their buildings. By keeping commerce alive in their streets, the city revived.
“If a small business closes, and a big chain moves in, we are doomed to see the same signs and architecture over and over again. We lose commercial, urban, and street diversity. When there are only franchises left, no one will believe that once there were family businesses, specialized shops, artisanal stores, and all kinds of basic necessities on our streets. Our cities’ Grahip Heritage will remind us of that time,” explains Nanclares.
The disappearing face of cities’ colorful history
Hypergentrification and the disappearance of local businesses are a global pandemic in cities around the world, and so neighborhoods are becoming species in extinction. COVID-19 has only exacerbated a rampant trend. An East Village blogger who goes by the pseudonym Jeremiah Moss has been writing Vanishing New York, chronicling the demise of beloved spots and ‘how a great city lost its soul’.
He also supports the #SaveNYC movement, a grassroots, crowdsourced DIY effort to raise awareness and take action to protect and preserve the diversity and uniqueness of New York City’s urban fabric.
In the early 2000s, photographers James and Karla Murray began a project to capture New York City’s iconic storefronts and catalog its neon signs before they disappeared.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, sad news about the closure of small businesses has been everywhere, even iconic establishments that had lasted for generations in cities. These closures create pandemic trauma because we might have been part of them in one way or another.
But, we shouldn’t blame the pandemic; eventually, some of these businesses were already on the verge of extinction, and they wouldn’t have been able to survive anyway, maybe because their business was outdated or they failed to develop robust online commerce that might have helped them survive when the tough times came. It is fine, we should let these businesses go. But should we let them disappear without any record? Shouldn’t we keep the signs as some part of our heritage and celebrate them?
“Ironically, some store owners don’t really care about their business’s commercial signs; in fact, they think they are worthless, but what they don’t realize is that they matter to the neighbors, proven by the several citizen movements and endless Instagram accounts documenting them. This is the idea of a Common Cultural Heritage, it is built and cataloged bottom-up,” explains Nanclares.
Cultural preservation is becoming an urgent concern of urban residents worried about the loss of their cities’ cultural identity, history, and heritage. Quite often, when it comes to heritage, city administrations focus on city tourism rather than the right of individuals and communities to know, understand, maintain, and develop cultural heritage and cultural expressions, as recognized in Article 5 of the 2001 UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity.
The developers in cities say they will save the signs – this history – but when the business moves, quite often the only way is to tear it down and start over. Graphic heritage is the city’s consciousness. Small stores, bars, and restaurants, and the living stories in those places, have a major impact on the economic and cultural development of cities. Rescuing commercial signs with their unique and precious aesthetics is the least we could do.
