Exorcising the Signature Roof  
By Martin Harris

The now-widely-trendy contempt (maybe too weak a noun?) for cars and highways held by the mostly-Volvo-driving intelligentsia (think The Insolent Chariots, written in 1958 by tail-fins-and-concrete critic John Keats) doesn’t trace back to the dawn of the automotive age in the early 20th century. When the first pleasure-driving-and-commuting limited access highways were built –one, the Long Island Motor Parkway, opened in the eastern suburbs of New York City in 1907-- the historical record shows no grass-roots anti-road-building resistance at the time. Similarly for the Bronx River Parkway, fully opened in 1923 in the northern suburbs; and the Merritt Parkway, opened in 1938 through then-exurban Connecticut, just as architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City concept –very low density, no urban cores, large house lots, lots of green space and superhighways—was in the current news. All that was then.

Now, the hostility to roads and private vehicles is quantifiable, and the self-appointed opinion-shapers want all their subjects to live a in smart-growth relatively-high-density New Urbanism, shed their cars, and ride municipal light rail when they’re not bicycling their groceries home from a non-big-box organic food store. By the time the Interstate and Defense Highway System went into actual design in 1956, the enemies, like Keats, were becoming rhetorically literal, opposing both rural alignments (think the White-River-to-Burlington I-89 corridor) and urban alignments (think the notorious brain-child of highway-builder-du-jour Robert Moses, the South Bronx Expressway) both put through, over substantial resistance, in the early 60’s. And today, consider the Circ.

Because cars and highways pose a goods-and-services marketing problem different from that of selling to pedestrians and carriage-riders, the free-standing or hanging little signs – a symbolic shoe, tooth, or barber pole, a discreet little name-and-title building-mounted plaque—could no longer catch a fast-moving potential customer’s attention; the building itself would have to be the symbol of its function. Thus, in 1921, the first White Castle hamburger-vendor opened in Wichita, and the building-as-symbol concept was copied by White Tower in Milwaukee in 1926, both with crenelated parapets concealing flat roofs. But, a year earlier, a marketing-savvy Howard Johnson had opened a discreetly "colonial" restaurant in Quincy, but then used a most-unlikely bright orange Mission Style (then sweeping suburban architectural fashion across the US, New England included) tile roof as his "signature". No record of contemporary resistance to his innovative "signature roof" marketing concept exists. All that was then.

Now, the hostility to signature roofs is quantifiable, the target-of-choice being the McDonald’s design with spaced vertical bars for which the purpose is advertising identifiability rather than structural support. In Middlebury, for example, it’s been the subject of critical discussion for both the existing building and now for its proposed replacement. Part of the criticism derives from a popular antipathy, in this politically-blue venue, to corporate / fast-food / strip-development commerce in general; to this observer, the equally-recognizeable similarly-purposed airplane-hangar roof of the National Bank of Middlebury having drawn almost no voiced outrage, the contrast is enlightening.

Maybe it’s because NBM isn’t nationwide and its inedible non-meat product is only indirectly fattening.

A town has every right to instruct its planners and zoners to exorcise the signature roof, as a permit-granting pre-requisite, if its voters so wish. Then, the planners should put the appropriate built-environment objectives language in the town plan, and the zoners should put the appropriate quantitative regulatory language in the zoning bylaws, defining the signature roof and the measurable characteristics to be limited or proscribed. If they find drafting a transparently quantitative regulation to be beyond their literary pay grade, they might adopt by specific quotation the example set by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in the 1964 obscenity case Jacobelli v. Ohio about the 1958 French movie, Les Amants (SCOTUS found none) when he wrote that "I shall not today attempt to define [a signature roof] and… perhaps I never shall …but I know it when I see it".

At my request, a local sous-les-couvertures operative scanned the Middlebury zoning by-laws for signature roof language, and found none. That absence bodes poorly for legitimate zoner control of the despised billboard architectural design, in the light of earlier court precedent discussed in this column a month ago, stating that "…only those provisions incorporated in the by-laws are legally enforceable". Read it for yourself in 137 Vermont Reports, Item 10.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights