I walked from the Pearl down to Burnside on Tuesday morning to get a coffee, and I counted plywood the whole way. Forty-one storefronts in about fifteen blocks. I quit counting near Ankeny because it had stopped being a number and started being a mood.
Downtown has been boarded since March. Some of the boards went up for the closures. Some went up after nights when glass got broken. By now nobody walking past can tell you which is which, and the plywood has outlasted whatever reason first put it there.
What struck me is that almost none of it is blank.
There are murals. There are hand-lettered signs with hours, a phone number, and WE ARE STILL HERE in house paint. There are spray-painted arrows pointing around the corner to a side door where you can pick up an order. And there are a few professionally printed vinyl wraps about togetherness in a typeface I could name from twenty feet away.
That last group is the one that stings.
A boarded window is a message whether you write on it or not, so the only real decision left is whether the message sounds like a person or like a department.
Three things the plywood makes obvious. One, it collapses the hierarchy of information. There is room for exactly one idea, and the businesses that knew their one idea wrote it in an hour with a paint pen. The ones that did not ordered a wrap and waited nine days.
Two, the surface is honest because it is cheap. Nobody can buy a better piece of plywood. I have watched brand teams spend six weeks specifying a window display. Four by eight sheets of construction-grade fir do not care, and the result is the closest thing to a level field this industry ever gets.
Three, most of these businesses have not had to write in their own handwriting in years. Everything went through a template, an agency deck, or a social calendar. Now the sign is literally handwritten, and you can hear the voice.
Salt & Straw wrote hours and a thank you. A bookstore near me wrote a list of what it could still ship. A bank wrote a paragraph that had clearly been through legal, and the paragraph said nothing.
Nobody can buy a better piece of plywood.
None of this is a silver lining. The boards are up because the year has been terrible, and a good sign on a bad wall is still a bad wall. But if you have been trying to get your team to write shorter, go look at Burnside.
I walked home in the drizzle and Truffles and Barnaby met me at the door, entirely uninterested in my thoughts about plywood, wanting dinner. Correct read, honestly.