Wonder why on-building signs never caught on in NA?
They were standard until I'm not sure when ... probably the 30s or 40s. I imagine they were too difficult to spot when cars started to travel at speeds significantly faster than carriages had.
You still see them - there were a few on houses around the Annex in Toronto and I remember a few in Winnipeg too - there was always one on the Fortune Block but I don't believe they replaced it when they finished restoring it last year.
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Here is another old way to indicate street names. I took this photo in 2009 of the street name OSBORNE PLACE in Winnipeg. This was interesting since my grandmother grew up on this street from about 1919 onward and by that time it was called Whitehall Avenue. (The street, directly across from the Manitoba Legislature, was eliminated in the 1950s but a portion of the sidewalk was retained.) So the "Osborne Place" sidewalk block, which is gone now, must have been close to a century old.
This postcard from my collection shows the corner of St. George Street and Harbord Street (left) and Hoskin Avenue (right), which is now the heart of the University of Toronto campus. The Robarts Library now stands where the houses on the left are and the house at right is now the Catholic Newman Centre. You can see a "Hoskin Avenue" sign nailed to the tree in front of that house.
I knew I was right about the "St. Mary Av." sign that used to be on the Fortune Block on Main Street in Winnipeg (removed, as far as I know, in the recent stunning renovation). It's visible just to the left of the No Stopping pictograph sign. I don't think that that type of sign would have been quite enough for the automobile age, and North America doesn't seem to have gone for the jumbo-sized street signs that Europe did.
In Halifax there are still a few old stone street signs. The new ones are a mix of generic black or green. The name of this street changed from Wallace to Bishop:
London has plain white text on green signs, with some streets named after fallen military, with a poppy on the sign, both examples in this google streetview image.
^Yeah much nicer. The newish ones look so tacky, like they're sold in Dollarama or Walmart. Iirc, Fergus and Elora have some interesting old signs either attached to buildings or even in stone.
Though I have to say I absolutely hate the abbreviations (St, Ave, Rd) without a period at the end. It just looks sloppy to me. Either write it out in full or end it with a period!
Though I have to say I absolutely hate the abbreviations (St, Ave, Rd) without a period at the end. It just looks sloppy to me. Either write it out in full or end it with a period!
The ones without the periods (and mixed upper and lower case) weren't very old anyway. They were the first attempt at "modernizing", probably in the 1990s. There are also some there from the various pre-amalgamation boroughs, which had different signs (mainly white on blue).
The use of periods in abbreviations is pretty much limited to the U.S. and Canadian English - U.K. style has disfavoured periods for decades now.
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