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What the Signs Say
Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn
by Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr
Although we may not think we notice them, storefronts and their signage are meaningful, and the impact they have on people is significant. What the Signs Say argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of the place known as Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than two thousand storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, the study charts two very different types of local Brooklyn retail signage. The unique and consistent features of many words, large lettering, and repetition that make up Old School signage both mark and produce an inclusive and open place. In contrast, the linguistic elements of New School signage, such as brevity and wordplay, signal not only the arrival of gentrification, but also the remaking of Brooklyn as distinctive and exclusive.
Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, a sociolinguist and an anthropologist respectively, show how the beliefs and ideas that people take as truths about language and its speakers are deployed in these different sign types. They also present in-depth ethnographic case studies that reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are intimately connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of privilege. Far from peripheral or irrelevant, shop signs say loud and clear that language displayed in public always matters.
This book is the recipient of the 2021 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.
Shonna Trinch is a sociolinguist and faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College, CUNY.
Edward Snajdr is a cultural anthropologist and faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College, CUNY.
"What the Signs Say charts emerging terrains of gentrification through an acute, open-eyed, and deeply contextualized reading of Brooklyn streetscapes and the signs that shape them. This is a fascinating and textured case study in itself. It also models generative new ways of approaching the complex intersections of language, landscape, and social experience."~Donald Brenneis
—Donald Brenneis, coeditor of the Annual Review of Anthropology
"This analysis of Brooklynites' sense of place is strikingly innovative and the ethnography utterly engaging. We see signage changing with the influx of gentrification, contrasting assumptions about whose Brooklyn it really is, and both older and newer residents invested in a sense of place as incoming chain businesses assuredly are not."~Bonnie Urciuoli
—Bonnie Urciuoli, author of Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class
"A compelling study of how business signs in Brooklyn neighborhoods serve as 'place-making technologies' that both signal and work in the interests of gentrification. The central argument—that 'new school' signs, while directly indexing playfulness and cleverness, indirectly index exclusivity—drives home the often subtle but profound ways that language is implicated in gentrification and exclusion, regardless of a sign author's expressed intent."~Gabriella Gahlia Modan
—Gabriella Gahlia Modan, author of Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place
Introduction
Discovering a Field Site
Have you ever noticed which of the street signs, over the shop doors, are the most attractive of attention? . . . the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious.
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” 1845
In the spring of 2007, a Brooklyn bagel-maker put up a sign for his new store on 5th Avenue near St. Marks Avenue in Park Slope. It read ARENA in five large capital letters, above the words BAGELS & BIALYS. The owner said he hoped to link his new shop to the coming sports arena, what would become the Barclays Center, the centerpiece of Atlantic Yards, New York City’s largest urban redevelopment project in the past fifty years. The multibillion-dollar plan included the basketball arena and sixteen high-rise office and residential towers in the middle of Brooklyn. The bagel seller soon learned that local residents planned to protest his store’s name. They read the name ARENA as an open endorsement of Atlantic Yards, which they were publicly and legally contesting. Local residents disagreed with the plan’s scale, and they felt that the developer and the state’s partnership was a misuse of public money and an abuse of government power for private profit (Lavine and Oder 2010; Snajdr and Trinch 2018a). Although the shop owner at first told a reporter he was going to ignore the neighbors’ threat (Kuntzman 2007), within a month, he relented, and a new, nearly identical, but ultimately very different sign went up: A.R.E.A. BAGELS & BIALYSEdgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” 1845
We heard about the wrangle over ARENA/A.R.E.A. Bagels from various informants when conducting our ethnographic study about neighborhood “say” in the Atlantic Yards controversy. For example, we heard about it from Patti Hagan, a Prospect Heights resident and community activist who first sounded the alarm about the plan. Daniel Goldstein, whose property was seized by the state to build the arena and who became the spokesman for Develop, Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), a grassroots group opposing the plan, also told us about the shop sign incident. But Goldstein explained that DDDB had no position on the bagel shop’s name and had never encouraged a boycott of the business. On DDDB’s website, a May 18, 2007, post entitled “We’re Focused on the Big Picture, Not the Bagel Hole” stated that “We believe that the use of eminent domain for [Atlantic Yards] violates the US Constitution and we have organized and continue to raise funds for a lawsuit alleging just that in federal court” (DDDB 2007). But in fact the discourse of both DDDB and the local press trivialized local residents’ concerns about the language of the bagel shop’s sign, arguing that there were more important things to fight over than a shop owner’s storefront. The Brooklyn Paper concluded that
the opponents of Atlantic Yards are so frustrated by Bruce Ratner and his high-priced pals that they’re taking out their aggression on a lowly bagel store owner. . . . So there it is, folks: An immigrant from Punjab—a guy who worked himself up from a dishwasher to a manager to, finally, the owner of bagel stores in Queens, Long Island and Brooklyn — is gunned down in the war over Atlantic Yards. (Kuntzman 2007)
Though we also understand the difference between a small business entrepreneur and a billion-dollar developer, the case of ARENA Bagels shows that the meaning of language in public space, even on the seemingly smallish scale of a storefront sign, can actually play a significant role in the contemporary contest over urban space. Clearly, some neighborhood residents felt they had the right to say something about the bagel-seller’s shop sign. And as it turned out, the shop owner, stating that he wanted to fit in with the neighborhood, decided to heed their concerns.