Soapboxmedia – American Sign Museum from Chas! Pangburn on Vimeo.

The museum is currently in Phase 3 of its 4-phase move into a new, expanded, permanent home in Camp Washington.  They’re still raising money, which you can help out with by purchasing a paver or painting a panel!

See here for past coverage of the Sign Museum.

First up is a long piece CityBeat did on the Vent Haven Ventriloquism Museum here in town, the only major public museum devoted to ventriloquism.

While it risks cliché to say this, the [Vent Haven] museum can legitimately be tagged a unique experience because of that. It regularly gets international attention. The New York Times last month did a major feature praising it (as well as another hard-to-see Greater Cincinnati museum, the American Sign Museum). National Public Radio has also featured it, and a Web site called Internationaltraveler.com listed it as one of the world’s 10 weirdest museums.

From Vent Haven Ventriloquism Museum

With a video!

Founded in 1975, the non-profit railway museum, located in the four-acre Latonia Yard, has a permanent collection of 37 pieces of historic equipment from the seven railroads entering Cincinnati.

So says Building Cincinnati, in a post about May’s Covington After Hours, about the Railway Museum of Greater Cincinnati.

I’ve probably driven down Decoursey Ave. in Latonia about a thousand times, so I’m fairly familiar.  I know about Johnny’s Toys and the now-vacant Value City store.  But I never knew there was a whole museum dedicated to trains hidden back there!

After a bit more digging, I turned up an old Cincinnati Post story (on the Wayback Machine) on the museum.

Some people never stop playing with trains.

Take 84-year-old Bill Ewing of Anderson Township, whose ”toy” is a real, bright yellow B&O Railroad caboose, for which he paid $2,500 15 years ago.

He keeps it in the rail yard of the Railway Museum of Greater Cincinnati, in Covington’s Latonia neighborhood, where he and other volunteers work on the museum’s 80-piece collection every Wednesday and Saturday.

… In the rail yard, each car has a unique story, and Ewing is eager to tell them.

A tiny green engine with a No. 1 on its face used to push coal into a power house, he said.

He helped paint a dark green passenger car, which he said was at least 75 years old. ”It’s priceless,” he said.

A red passenger car, which had two master bedrooms and a shower, was one of four end cars for the Broadway Limited in New York, volunteer Bill Williams said.

There’s also a long article up on Roadside America.

A stone’s throw from Hamilton, some 25 miles from downtown Cincinnati, lies a public park with monumental sculpture and an underground house.Pyramid Hill sprawls over 265 acres of rolling hills, man-made lakes, thick woodlands and butterfly-filled meadows. Overlooking the Great Miami River, it is a contemporary art museum outdoors – a place where visitors can hike or drive through natural galleries filled with the splendor of art.

More at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, the Enquirer, and Cincinnati USA.

CET conducted this interview with Harry Wilks, the park and museum’s founder and director in 2007.

Sure enough, the world’s only ventriloquism musuem is in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky. Nearly 700 dummies, countless posters, playbills, photographs, and racks and racks of bodiless heads. I’m no dummy, but that’s weird!

That old commercial for seatbelt safety may have already said it, but you really can learn a lot from a dummy. Especially when you’re surrounded by nearly 700 of them.

Located on a quiet Fort Mitchell street just five miles from downtown Cincinnati, the Vent Haven Museum is the world’s only museum dedicated to the art of ventriloquism. The museum was founded by William Shakespeare “W.S.” Berger, an amateur ventriloquist who retired as president of Cincinnati’s now-defunct Cambridge Tile Company.

There’s also the annual Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion.

More from BoingBoing and the Vent Haven Museum.

What: The American Sign Museum
Where: Essex Studios, 2515 Essex Ave., Walnut Hills.
When: Reception 3 p.m. Thursday, ribbon cutting
4 p.m., celebration dinner cruise 6:15 p.m.
Cost: Free, but a $5 donation is suggested.
Information: (513) 258-4020; www.signmuseum.org.

The Sign Museum currently has no set hours but founder Tod Swormstedt will open it any day of the week for anyone who calls.

Here is something yet to be seen in full. A sign museum The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati. From the looks of their webpages they have a pretty cool collection. Right now they are only open by appointment only. But starting April 28th 2005 they will begin regularly scheduled visiting hours.

I took a stroll by the American Sign Musuem today, located, not on Gilbert (as I had believed) but on Essex between Taft and McMillan (see website for directions). Across the street from the museum is what looks like a sign graveyard of long forgotten fast-food monoliths. Are they just too big for the museum?

The sign graveyard (sorry the truck’s in the way).

Old school McDonald’s and the American Sign Museum sign.

Mmm… Arby’s.

Where is the American Sign Museum?

The Museum is located in the Walnut Hills area of Cincinnati, just five minutes from downtown, at 2515 Essex Avenue in the Essex Studios building. The American Sign Museum still maintains its business office and houses its archives of paper items – books, catalogs, photos, artwork, etc. – at the offices of ST Media Group in downtown Cincinnati, OH at 407 Gilbert Avenue/Cincinnati, OH 45202.

Prior to September, 2002, the Museum had maintained three storage facilities: One each in Portland, OR; Las Vegas, NV; and an additional location in Cincinnati. Signs in the Portland and Las Vegas warehouses were consolidated at the Cincinnati warehouse in November, 2002 in preparation for the anticipated opening of the new facility.

American Sign Museum
407 Gilbert Avenue
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202