Summary
Pawn shops, pay-day-advance brokers, national check cashiers, gun and ammunition suppliers, discount cigarettes, beer, and liquor, 24-hour locksmiths, and automotive repair shops (figure 1, following page) frequently use a bright, shiny, plastic, primarily-yellow colored signage to identify themselves. These businesses, aimed especially at those in a state of urgency or distress, are often located in the poorest areas of the city. Because of the consistency of the use of the color yellow by these urgent businesses, and because of the limited areas where they appear “to belong,” a massing of yellow signage color codes the poorest parts of the city with a vivid wash of bright yellow. The result is a landscape which could be termed “Yellow Town.” Yellow Town has been observed in several cities including Chicago, Illinois, Columbus, Ohio and most recently Austin, Texas. I choose to focus my research in Lexington, Kentucky for two reasons: Lexington’s commercial beltway, New Circle Road, is a good site to study “Yellow Town” because it encircles the entire city, and passes through several socio-economic conditions; second, because Lexington has a history of slavery and segregation, the socio-economic lines of wealthy citizens and impoverished citizens fall sharply along racial demographics (figure 2). Lexington is very much a city of wealthy white and poor black citizens, and these divisions are formalized in the city landscape.
Date of Original
1-1-2008
Volume
1
Issue
2
Broad Type
Article
Specific Collection
Multi: the RIT Journal of Diversity and Plurality in Design.
Notes
Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to the RIT Digital Institutional Repository in August 2025; Some links embedded into the PDF may not work
