Just one of the more notorious companies, Wiki-PR – now known as Status Labs – declared operating revenues of over $7 million for 2017, had 200 active clients in August 2018, and currently employs 48 staff members. Taken together, the hundreds or thousands of businesses who commercially insert advertisements into the encyclopedia likely bring in many times that amount. Their budget is about $100 million per year. It supports the servers that provide over a billion people a month with immediate access to the encyclopedia, maintains and upgrades the software, and provides grants to editors' projects throughout the world. And I’ll keep coming back.The WMF has a difficult job. ![]() So I am glad this imperfect masterpiece is still here doing what it does. Thanks to boring landlords, tasteless planning commissioners, and city councils who function like glorified suburban school board members, colorful janky signs like this often get replaced with lifelessly uniform crud that no one wants to look at. I say so because the comfortable classes in San Jose rarely understand this stuff. Someone should do a painting of this one. You don’t have to be an artist to appreciate these perspectives, but there’s a reason why several painters over the decades have depicted old-school San Jose street signage in their paintings. The brokenness and the flaws are what make it enduring and attractive. The cracks are what make the sign gorgeous.Īll of which then directs me, in the same vein, right to a Japanese term, kintsukuroi, or “golden repair,” a common image in our meme-saturated social media culture, where broken pottery or ceramics are glued back together with gold lacquer, the point being, just because someone or something is broken doesn’t mean it’s no longer valuable. Such are the vibes transmitted to me by this colorful sign. For example, in Leonard Cohen’s tune “Anthem,” he riffs on Rumi by saying, “Forget your perfect offering. Standing right there on the sidewalk of White Road and looking up at the impure glory of this sign, any interesting person with a shred of imagination would wax philosophical. There is no need for any faux-Tuscany horseshit anywhere in this strip mall. As a presentation, it exudes more character and invokes more intrigue than all the Chase Bank-ified monstrosities you see throughout the rest of San Jose. The whole conglomeration is a righteous mishmash of component parts, a paean to the organic miscellany of life in any real city. The Sprint shop is no more, as a Metro by T-Mobile sign now hangs underneath “Y Market,” right where the Hermanos Navarro Western Wear sign used to hang. The Joyeria del Sol sign is where the Sprint sign used to be. LV Hair and Nails used to say Paris Jewelers. The big red and yellow “liquor” on top is where the Corona Taqueria sign used to be. Newer signs sit right below older ones with ancient sun-faded lettering. Every business is noted by a different sign, a different design, a different typeface. The damn thing just screams to the piecemeal nature, the cobbled-together aspects of San Jose in general, providing a marvelous glimpse into the historical continuity of the strip mall, which goes back to at least 1972, if not earlier. I’m prowling around this particular sidewalk because I will continue to yap about this sign for its superb hodgepodge incongruity. I’m not an “influencer.” I don’t write tourist guides. No one from Saratoga will ever come wandering down this block.īut I’m not here to “recommend” things. Now, of course, as I would expect, this stretch of road has its challenges just like many other neighborhoods. The sign at the sidewalk tells you all you need to know. Oh, the stories this sign can tell.įirst of all, there is a bar here, the Gaslight, and it needs absolutely no introduction. It’s like hanging out with some old salt in a bar somewhere just to hear the myths and legends he’s put together in his head over the years. Luckily, few of the conniving developers ever venture past Tenth Street, so they haven’t targeted this little gem for destruction. These days, when real estate developers relentlessly smash whatever is in their way, one doesn’t get to see a masterpiece of diversity like this particular sign. I use the phrase “still features,” because I don’t get to type those words very often when describing signage. The intersection of East Hills and White Road still features one of the most vibrant old-school strip-mall signs anywhere in San Jose.
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