NEWS FROM PAGE 9 SIGN
was there.” Hanford said Kensingtonians
were cheering and crying when the sign went back up after being down for several months. “People in Kensington are very possessive of their library, their little coffee shops, anything that’s the origi- nal,” she said. “They don’t want things to change.” Hanford learned just how much the Kensington sign meant to her personally while giving customers directions to her video store before the sign's replacement. “I’ve been telling people you get off Interstate-15 onto Adams and you see the sign; but then I thought, there’s no sign—what the heck am I say- ing? Oh my gosh, I used it as a landmark.”
Hanford admitted lights burn- ing out on the original Kensington sign were a problem, often a comi- cal one. “A lot of times we only had the ‘Ken’ in Kensington lit,” she said. “Another time only ‘sin’ was lit up. We got a big kick out of that.” Tyler Blik, in an e-mail interview, waxed nostalgic about the restored community icon’s significance. “I witnessed the new sign for the first time and found it delight- fully amusing that one of the neon letter forms was not lit ... I smiled, recalling all of the community dis- cussions, the wrestling of what proper aesthetic should be hon- ored, and there the sign smiled back at me with a spirit of its past. … Perhaps they should fix it ever so slightly, to where that lonely let- ter just flickers in the night. My 30-plus years of going to the Ken Cinema, to the Kensington Club, to Kensington Video and the Kens-
ington Café have my heart throb- bing again.”
The Kensington monument sign played a pivotal role in the com- munity’s formation, contends local historian Ron May, who worked with Celia Conover to get the sign historically designated.
May said the sign’s origin dates back to a group of business owners who paid for it in 1953. In 1954, he said, those merchants arranged with both the City and County of San Diego to have the sign’s poles erected on public land during a time when Kensing- ton and Talmadge were both out- side the city limits. “A fire burned some houses and the City Fire Department refused service because it was outside their service area, and this spurred Kensington and Talmadge to annex to the City of San Diego,” said May. “At the same time, the businesses
San Diego Uptown News | December 10–23, 2010
erected the sign to promote their local business. The local Ken-Tal Association has been paying for repairs and mainte- nance of the sign for the past 56 years. The sign has been a land- mark to everyone entering the community on Adams Avenue for that period of time.” In the final days of Council-
woman Toni Atkins’ term, May said she convinced the city to take down the old Kensington sign to inspect it for lead and safety is- sues. “Once the sign came down, members of the Ken-Tal Associa- tion and the contractor broke the sign apart using steel tools, and then declared it could not be re- stored because it was broken,” he said. “There was a lot of outrage over breaking the sign.”
But because the sign had been historically designated as a land- scape feature, May said the city opted to strictly enforce the rules
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demanding that a replica be cre- ated that “looks just like the one destroyed.” Bruce Coons spoke for many in the community when he said, “It’s great to have it back up. It feels like home: It feels like Kensington.”u
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