If this sign outside Michael Piccarreta's law office were taken down for restoration, the city's sign code would prohibit putting it back up. A committee has been formed to try to get the code changed. / Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star
Code prevents renovation of signs of bygone times
BY MEGAN NEIGHBOR, FOR THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Michael Piccarreta stands on the balcony of his law office, looking out at a girl who has been preparing to leap off a diving board for the past 65 years.
"She's tall, probably 4 or 5 feet tall if she wasn't bent over," Piccarreta said, motioning to "diving girl," who is mounted atop an antique sign for what was once the Pueblo Hotel and Apartments' swimming pool.
Despite her poise, diving girl is showing her age. She's rusted, and the once-brilliant neon letters are broken and hanging from the sign.
To preservationists, she's an endangered species, one they'd love to nourish back to health. But a quirk in the city sign code makes that impossible.
Most historic signs violate the current sign code because they are too large, too tall or too near a right-of-way. If an owner removes the aged sign from the property for restoration, under the current sign code it can't go back up, said Jonathan Mabry, historic preservation officer for the city of Tucson.
"Once they deteriorate, owners have no ability really to restore them," said Mabry.
That's put owners of historic signs, such as Piccarreta with his diving girl sign, in a tough place. He'd like to replace the sign's broken neon tubing and rusted facade, but under current sign code, he can't.
"The sign code is a confusing mess at best, so the city of Tucson has to figure out what's the best way to preserve what they have," said Piccarreta.
That's why Mabry has teamed up with the Tucson-Pima County Historical Commission to form an ad hoc committee dedicated to changing the sign code. They want a provision that lets businesses refurbish historic signs and place them in a different location on the property or within what Mabry refers to as a historic sign district.
"These historical sign districts would be in existing areas where old signs are or were," Mabry said.
Ideally, committee members would like to combine existing signs and salvaged signs in these districts.
Demion Clinco, Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation president and member of the ad hoc committee, has obtained several historic signs in the last few years from Magic Carpet Golf, the Arizona Motel and Medina Sporting Goods.
With the help of his foundation, Clinco hopes to refurbish and reinstall the signs within the historic districts.
But debate over what is historic may prevent some of Clinco's salvaged signs, like the one from Magic Carpet, from being included in districts.
"If the cutoff is 1960, I'm guessing there would probably only be 45 signs total," said Clinco. "So all this work and all this energy just to say, we are going to exclude the other 50" that are slightly newer.
Dirk Arnold, a Tucson artist who salvaged the Ye Olde Lantern sign after it was removed from what is now the Elks Club, hopes the lantern will light up Tucson's night sky again.
"There are some people in town who would love to start some kind of neon museum, kind of like what they are trying to get going in Las Vegas, where we could take some of these old signs that have suffered this fate, fix them up and put them up," said Arnold. "I'm just kind of baby-sitting the lantern until such time."
