Sign Museum Plans Bigger Home In Camp Washington

[Erik Sine]

Sign Museum plans bigger home in Camp Washington

Habig's bubbling neon champagne glass latest addition

BY CLIFF RADEL | CRADEL@ENQUIRER.COM

Tod Swormstedt, founder and president of the American Sign Museum in Walnut Hills, plans on relocating the museum to Camp Washington in the fall.

CAMP WASHINGTON - The American Sign Museum is heading west. The museum plans to leave its original home in Walnut Hills in the fall for a Camp Washington building on the National Register of Historic Places.

"We're out of room where we are," said Tod Swormstedt, the museum's founder. The museum has only 120 of its 250 signs displayed at its Essex Place location.

"We only have 6,300 square feet in Walnut Hills," said Swormstedt. "We'll eventually have 40,000 square feet in Camp Washington."

To make the move official, Swormstedt must poll his board of trustees about plans for the new space, "sign a mountain of legal papers and get the zoning changed. Then, we can move."

The museum is moving into an unoccupied section of the historic Machine Flats Building. Located catty-corner to Valley Park and its restored World War I Doughboy statue, the building was recently renovated for $7.2 million and turned into 60 loft apartments.

The Machine Flats Building began life 89 years ago as the Oesterlein Machine tool plant. In later years, the four-story structure and its attached one-story manufacturing facility housed the Fashion Frocks clothing plant. During World War II, the dress manufacturer made parachutes.

Swormstedt called the machine tool plant's one-story manufacturing facility and sturdy, load-bearing walls, ceilings and floors "the perfect place for a sign museum."

The plant required high ceilings and overhead rigging, still in place, to stabilize and move heavy machinery.

"That's just what we need to display large signs that weigh a ton," Swormstedt said.

The cost to move the museum and buy and renovate the one-story building is $1.3 million.

Swormstedt said the museum is a little more than halfway to raising the money.

Rodney Randall of Holthaus Signs & Identification Systems works on removing the sign at the former Habig's Restaurant in Westwood. The sign is moving to the American Sign Museum.

In Camp Washington, the museum will be able to display a 21-foot Howard Johnson's sign, said Swormstedt, and the 25- by 18-foot Speedy McDonald sign that came from the first McDonald's restaurant in Kansas.

The new space also will feature a 14-by-50-foot section of aged boards Swormstedt removed from a barn in Lanesville, Ind. Painted on the side of the barn that's now a museum piece is a sign urging passersby to chew Mail Pouch tobacco.

The signs will be displayed along what Swormstedt described as "the town square of Signville. Instead of fountains and trees, our town square will have signs."

Flanking the town square will be more than a dozen storefronts sporting still more signs.

Certain to be on display will be the museum's latest acquisition, the bubbling neon champagne glass removed last week from the shuttered Habig's Restaurant in Westwood.

"Usually, the old signs we get never work," Swormstedt noted.

"After we got the Habig's sign, I hot-wired it. The thing fired right up. It was really bright."

[joemomma]

You are too fast, SG. I read this article in the Enquirer this morning, just got back to the shop to go online to see if it's at the Enquirer's web site, but of course as always had to check out the Syndicate first, and you beat me to it.

Tod's doing a great job over at the museum. If you're ever in the Cincinnati area, it's a must visit. Did you ever wonder how signs were internally illuminated before electricity was being used? Visit the museum and you'll wonder no more.