A Good Sign for Thompson and Main

Allen Quigg has seen the sign of the times--and he doesn’t like it very much.

A professional sign maker and longtime Ventura resident, Quigg is at odds with a city ordinance that outlaws signs attached to roofs and poles.

The 15-year-old law is intended to keep Ventura from turning into a mini-Las Vegas, cluttered with big, brash advertisements that would compromise the city’s suburban character.

But Quigg says the law has unintentionally targeted a strip of funky, 1950s-era signs that have dotted Thompson Boulevard and Main Street since those thoroughfares served as U.S. Highway 101.

By trying to guard against visual pollution, the city is surrendering its character and history, Quigg believes.

“They are trying to turn the town into that strip-mall thing,” Quigg said. “As a historic area, this one [evokes] a lot of nostalgia.”

The impassioned, 53-year-old sign maker went before the city’s Planning Commission this week to spare one of Main Street’s drive-by monuments: a fading Loop’s restaurant sign that towers over the old highway.

Although the restaurant has a new name, the owners wanted to keep the 40-year-old sign and hired Quigg to change the lettering.

But because the sign is perched on a roof--and roof signs are prohibited--city planners said the sign had to go.

Outraged, Quigg went before the panel.

“This,” he pleaded, “is a tremendous asset for the city.”

Softened by his presentation, commissioners voted unanimously to keep the sign--despite a staff recommendation to take it down and replace it with something less conspicuous.

“It is said that it is good planning practice to get rid of these things,” Planning Commissioner Ted Temple declared. “[But] we have to expand our thinking. We have to preserve our history.”

Loop’s isn’t the only sign dubbed “nonconforming” under city law.

The spacey 5 Points Car Wash & Gas sign, with its angled pole and Jetsons-esque design, is likewise nonconforming. So is the geometric, black-and-red Loop Motor Lodge sign farther down the block.

Technically, the city considers these signs to be “legally nonconforming,” which means they may stand as long as they are not altered. If the owner makes any alteration to a roof or pole sign, as in the case of Loop’s restaurant, the sign must come down.

But those are the very monuments, built in the 1950s to lure a car-crazed culture off the highway, that some city leaders agree should be preserved.

“This is a district,” Temple said. “This is Route 66.”

Planning Commission Chairman Sandy Smith, a Ventura resident for 45 years, said the city needs to develop a better system for protecting its landmarks.

“A lot of these things that are being torn down in our community need to be looked at,” Smith said. “I have seen so many cool things go, I can’t keep track.”

Smith points to the destruction of the city’s old train depot and the loss of the Art Deco Coca-Cola bottling plant. The problem is that none have met the city’s test for historical status, which is that the structure is older than 50 years.

“In business, we call those things ‘points of difference,’ ” Smith said. “The things that make you different as a community or different as a business are the things that make you marketable.

“I think that we need to come up with some way of doing this so we are not losing landmarks around the city that later we are going to wish we hadn’t lost,” he said.

Even the city planner who recommended replacing the Loop’s sign said the Thompson district is reminiscent of a bygone era that is rarely preserved.

“Personally, I think it is a neat strip,” said Maura C. M. Matteucci, an associate planner. “That used to be the highway, and it looks like it used to be the highway.”

For his part, Quigg says he understands the need to keep the city from looking cluttered. But he worries that Ventura’s campy, quirky and “nonconforming” landmarks could be pushed out over time.

“The pendulum has swung so far,” he said Friday in his sign shop--which, oddly, bears no sign.

“They’re tired of signs screaming at them,” Quigg said of the ordinance authors. “So they’ve codified what they feel.”