Residents and visitors alike will be welcomed in style with new monument signage being developed for a Point Loma gateway.

The community’s new landmark sign at its northeast entrance at Rosecrans and Lytton streets is to be outfitted with lighting so it can be seen at night.

Details of this Point Loma Association project were unveiled at the group’s annual dinner on Oct. 30. Plans reveal the resemblance of the new Point Loma gateway sign to the recently restored Hillcrest monument sign.

“We just kicked off detail design for this signage,” said landscape architect JT Barr, a PLA board member and president and managing partner of Schmidt Design. “That will take about three months. Then we’ll get permitting for the signage through the City. Our goal is, within the next 18 months to two years, to have the sign permitted and installed.”

Barr pointed out that the new Point Loma monument sign was the end product of discussions over time about a void in distinguishing signage, which he noted establishes “a sense of identity in a community.”

Barr, who chairs PLA’s projects committee, was also involved in the Village Lights project, which was formally dedicated on May 9, 2022. The centerpiece of that multi-phase PLA project is a canopy of lights strung between Talbot, Canon, and Rosecrans streets. The Village Lights project was seeded with a $60,000 grant from the County of San Diego through former supervisor Greg Cox’s office and $5,000 from the City through Council District 2.

Más de 250 personas y 30 empresas patrocinaron el proyecto Village Lights, mientras que los servicios de ingeniería y diseño fueron proporcionados por DPR Construction, Schmidt Design Group, ELEN Consulting, Rick Engineering, BWE y American Wiring.

The PLA has contracted with Graphic Solutions, specialists in the design of gateway signage, to design the new Rosecrans-Lytton sign. “It was important for us as a board that this new gateway sign be an exposition of Point Loma, who we are, and of its location,” noted Barr adding, “So light posts are part of the design inspired from the historic lamp posts that are visually significant elements found in Loma Portal.”

Concerning the writing on the new gateway sign, Barr said: “The font will be cursive, a reference to the history of Point Loma, a community within the City of San Diego.”

Once the design of the new gateway signage is complete, Barr said the PLA will then entertain bids for its manufacture “reaching out to individual contractors specializing in this type of work.”

POINT LOMA ASSOCIATION

The Point Loma Association is a nonprofit comprised of a 20-member board of directors and 10 committees including the Mean Green Team, Graffiti Busters, and over 1,000 resident and business members, sponsors, donors, and hundreds of dedicated volunteers. “Our all-volunteer organization has been beautifying and enhancing our community for over 50 years,” said PLA chair Sandy Hanshaw at pointloma.org.

SAN DIEGO SIGNS

San Diego has a unique collection of community identity signs. Some are historic, some are more modern, but all help to create a sense of place for the unique character of the community they represent. These signs are a sense of pride for residents, a welcoming feature for visitors, and often a driver for economic development. There are presently 14 monument street signs in the region including Hillcrest, North Park, El Cajon Boulevard, Normal Heights, Kensington, Gaslamp Quarter, Little Italy, Barrio Logan, Chula Vista, Imperial Beach, El Cajon, Encinitas, Carlsbad, and University Heights.

City of San Diego monument signs are presently located in North Park at the intersection of University and 30th installed in 1935 and replaced by a median pedestal sign in 1993; the 25-foot-long red metal and pink neon Hillcrest sign erected in 1940, rebuilt in 1984, and again in 2011, originally was a gift from female shopkeepers; the El Cajon Boulevard sign erected in 1989 as a major new landmark promoting the boulevard as a destination and encouraging further community revitalization; the Kensington sign that hangs above Adams Avenue, which is a historic replica of the original installed in 1954; installed in 1990 utilizing neon, incandescent, and fluorescent lighting techniques, the Gaslamp Quarter sign is a uniquely luminous example and is one of San Diego’s most photographed and recognizable downtown landmarks; Little Italy’s blue neon-and-silver metal sign was installed in 2000.