The Nordeast Sign Shark

I’m not going to bore you with a step by step account of Sunday’s sharking run. It was a success, and I had a fellow sharker with me to lend a hand. You can look at the gallery and map and get an idea of the route we ran if you’d like. Let’s instead talk about sharking and why I do it, using my latest run as an illustration.

Have you ever been down Marshall St? I have, many times. It’s a road full of history. Close enough to the river to encapsulate the life of Minneapolis from all angles, industrial to residential. It has shops and bars and schools and churches, houses on all ends of the financial spectrum, from nice condos down by St. Anthony to the ramblers of upper Nordeast. If you drive this road on a summer day, you see local traffic of a most specific nature, the Minneapolis that tourists wish they could experience but often never find.

And then I see some crappy sign on a post, a leech hoping to make a quick buck off some down-on-their-luck local. This is the principle matter, people. These gaudy, obtuse signs don’t belong here. They prey on the uninformed, and to some degree, they are effective; else there wouldn’t be an economic drive to do this.

The city of Minneapolis knows this. Most cities know this. That’s why they’re illegal. They’re listed under nuisance laws most of the time. We all tolerate nuisances to a degree. But while I can’t kill every mosquito in Nordeast, I can at least whack down a few god-awful signs.

I don’t have illusions of grandeur. I know I’m not stopping drug trafficking or preventing assaults. That’s actually the whole point of doing this, because it’s something our City doesn’t have the resources to combat. It’s how these sign spammers thrive, on the thin budgets of municipalities and the complacency of the neighborhood. 

But Nordeast isn’t complacent, if fellers like me rise out of the woodwork. The way I see it, it’s either your tax dollars or my free time, and I don’t mind the task. Just one more antibody keeping our city a little bit cleaner. I’m nothing more than a tendril of the community, a hair on the bull’s tail swatting at another fly. Okay, that metaphor ran away from me. The point being, it’s part of our civil responsibility to keep our neighborhoods clean. You don’t tolerate litter, why tolerate spam?

Since I need to throw it in, I’m all for promoting local business. I see roofing signs in lawns of the homes that these roofers helped improve. Bravo. I see signs that point to new restaurants or new apartment complexes. This is great, as long as it keeps to the locality of your business. I’ll make another post in the future to help define how I use judgement when taking down snipe signs. See you next time, and keep Nordeast looking great.