EXPLAINER TABULATES THE GREAT STREET SIGN SELL-OFF.

1 Mike Cohen is a familiar face and name to anyone who picks up The Suburban. He's also the Côte St-Luc city councillor responsible for communications and naming. Cohen decided it was time to spruce up the street signs. "We had these old signs that were rusting, you couldn't read a lot of the letters, and some of them didn't conform to [language] regulations," he says. The city set aside $150,000 to get their signs into shape, and Cohen and city communications director Darryl Levine got to work reimagining the signs. "We now have some nice, big, green and bilingual signs after going back and forth with council," Cohen says. "By last spring we were ready to go ahead and make the order. They were up by the end of the summer." After the roughly 350 new signs were in place, inspiration struck.

2 About 150 of these old signs were salvageable. The rest had to go right in the garbage. Cohen says they decided to sell the old signs to the public and have the money go toward the city's emergency medical services. "I remember how nostalgic it was when they sold the seats at the Forum, so I said, 'Let's see what we can do to sell signs,'" he recalls. They decided to price them at $50 for the first week of the sale, and $25 for the second week. The sale ended this past Friday. As soon as Cohen shared news of the sale on Facebook, he started getting inquiries. "I was flabbergasted by the number of former Côte St-Luc-ers that were desperate for a sign," he says. "I got an email from a girl who lives in California and she said her sister and brother-in-law met at a bus stop on Fleet Rd., and that she had to have the sign as a gift." Even local CTV anchor and ageless heartthrob Mutsumi Takahashi bought a sign from the street she grew up on. As of last Thursday, they'd sold 53 signs, which raised $2,100. If you've got a hankering for some signage, the remaining inventory will be on sale at the Côte St-Luc spring fair.
 
 

		Write your comment on this article!

Sign of the Times     Nothing like Nostalgic Recycling. What better way to revisit one's youth than to own an actual tangible and timeless part of it? I'm not at all surprised that some of these signs are being scooped up en masse. Mind you, I'm not totally sure I'd want a street sign denoting that I grew up on a street as non-descript as "2nd Ave" or some such thing but others - like that big "Cote St-Luc" street sign - definitely have some very evocative nostalgic cachet!
David St Pierre		November 9th, 2009

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