Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 41: Lincoln City Street Blades, In Passing

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As we came back through L.C., I got me some street blade pix. 

You know. How I do.

The street grid in Lincoln City holds endless fascination for me, as I've said before. I'm coming up with an article that I'll submit to a blog of a fellow I very much respect exploring it. For now, it's only necessary to know this: for directional prefixes, the city is quartered by US 101, L.C.'s main street, and the "D" River into NW, NE, SW and SE quadrants. 

The average L.C. city street blade looks more or less like this:

There are a few obvious observations that one can make from this, and they aren't outre at all. L.C. follows a standard and predictable design logic which renders an easily-understood design grammar: the directional and the specific are of a lesser size which cause the actual street name (or number in this case) to be the star of the design. The ordinal, in the case of the numbered street, is appropriately sized.

The blade that's very oblique in this view can be seen a bit clearer, though smaller, in the deep background, at the corner with NE 18th Pl. It simply says N HWY 101. South Hwy 101 is called out in identical style on the other side of the "D" River.

The fascination in L.C. isn't so much in the simplicity of of the design but it the way it's actually somewhat inconsistently applied. Not too far from this corner, we found this:

This gives a good view of the standard named blade in town, and a very oblique view again of another. Here one can see that the generic ST doesn't line up with the directional like on the top blade, rather, it's centered. The impression given, when compared with other L.C. street blades, is a bit of casual sloppiness. 

There are other blade sets which come off as kind of avant garde, such as this one:

Here the layout is followed faithfully, but the font jumps out at you. I'm pretty sure that that Helvetica-esque font isn't an MUTCD standard, it looks atypical for street blades and, except for the capital "I" in the street name Inlet, there are no majuscules anywhere, and it's used in a very consistent way on the blades. 

It's a bit of a wonder, really.

And that concludes our little tour of the street blades of Lincoln City.