Portland, OR Street Sign Shop Circa 1916
From the 1916 book Municipal Engineering Practice, by A. Prescott Folwell, published by Wiley and Sons and made available to the world by Google Books. This book is now in the public domain.
This picture, on page 295, shows the inside of Portland's street sign shop with several signs either being made or ready for installation. The amazing thing is the signature Portland style of the time, which I would call a sort of grotesque, heavy strokes with clipped angles at the corners, similar to lettering seen on military equipment. The dark areas on the signs were a deep, dark blue.
This style survived on PDX street blades well into the middle third of the 20th Century, when they were replaced by white letterforms on green:
Thanks to fellow signster Eric Fischer (http://enf.livejournal.com/) for the find, which you can access at http://books.google.com/books?id=7AJLAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22street%20name%20signs%22&pg=PA295#v=onepage&q=%22street%20name%20signs%22&f=false ,
as well as download a complete PDF of the book, which is okay since it is, as mentioned, in the public domain.
