I didn’t have to go far to learn more about Grove City to flesh out the observations I made while walking the bridges. The Borough helpfully installed history markers along the historic business core of South Broad Street. I photographed 33 of the plaques, which I think is all, for anyone interested in virtually visiting these history markers. Of course, these could also be used in the debate over art vs. sign as they also fall into the nuanced mess of the grey area.
My day job for the last decade is working with zoning ordinances. *Yawn,* right? Except I find it surprisingly intriguing. For example, when I visited Grove City in 2022, I was in the middle of writing new model sign regulations for zoning. The puzzle pieces for this effort included incorporating Supreme Court rulings on the constitutionality of sign regulations and making the regulations easier to understand and follow.1 So signs were already on my mind when I encountered Grove City’s parking sculptures and my brain exploded.
Besides the century-old battle between planners and billboard companies, the most difficult thing about sign regulations is the definition of sign. Art cannot be regulated by zoning, but signs can. However, there is a lot of grey between art and sign. Grove City exemplifies that grey area.
Grove City has a series of outdoor sculptures that incorporate directional signage for public parking areas. Based on a strict interpretation of Pittsburgh’s definition of sign (which interpretation frequently got me into arguments with my boss when I was zoning staff for Pittsburgh), the minute any component of a piece of artwork contains a sign, the whole piece of art becomes a sign (see Pittsburgh’s Zoning Ordinance Section 919.01.C.1). The phrase “or any structure designed to carry the above visual information” supports my interpretation that Grove City’s parking sculptures would not be permitted in Pittsburgh because they would not comply with the sign regulations.
Fortunately, Grove City’s zoning ordinance measures a sign only on the “separate individual letters, words, or graphic elements on the background” (see Grove City Zoning Ordinance Section 702, page 72 of 84 in the PDF). As the structure doesn’t count in the calculation of sign area in Grove City, I can now understand how parking sign sculptures could be created without violating their own ordinance.
If you are a frequent visitor to urbantraipsing, you know I don’t typically take selfies. However, I did with the first parking sculpture I encountered in Grove City to provide a sense of scale. These are substantial structures. I am standing in the selfie…and, for those who don’t know me in person, I am 6 feet tall.
I bought my first car in 2021. It ended up having a lot of problems. The first time I tried to drive to Erie, it started shaking like it was going to spontaneously break apart into a million pieces, just like a cartoon. Instead, it went into limp home mode and I turned around at the next exit, which was the middle of nowhere. After several repairs and a period of no further incidents, the following year I was ready to try again. But first, I tested the car to see if it could handle Rt. 79.
I knew of Grove City as an exit about halfway to Erie and as the closest outlet mall to Pittsburgh. I decided to aim for the actual Borough of Grove City1 as a destination to explore while testing my car’s ability to handle the speed limit and hills of Rt. 79. Naturally, since I arrived safely and knew nothing about the town, I set out to walk the bridges.
A town of 2.7 square miles and less than 8,000 residents, Grove City has several bridges over Wolf Creek and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the town’s premier pedestrian bridge, Rainbow Bridge (pictured above), was closed due to construction activities in the area. I discovered a second, unmapped pedestrian bridge over a small tributary to Wolf Creek, which I crossed only to see a sign on the other side claiming the bridge was not a throughway and directing people to use the sidewalks on the street to reach Grove City College’s main campus.
While the bridges themselves were structurally uninteresting, except for the Rainbow Bridge, I visited a throughout cross-section of town in walking them….which is the point of my bridge walking habit. My path took me through the college campus, the now less prominent industrial area, the large homes built for the boss class of the industries, the small homes built for the industrial workers, and the business district, both the car oriented portion and the historic portion. There are several bridgeless neighborhoods that I did not visit, but even without them, I learned a lot about the town in a short space of time.
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