Crossing the Lines: Highland Park Resident wants to save the Highland Appliance sign

Drivers traveling along Woodward Avenue in Highland Park may be familiar with the abandoned Highland Appliance store just north of the Davison Freeway.

It was the first in a chain of consumer electronics and home appliance stores, founded in 1933 in Highland Park.  By 1985 the chain had more than 80 stores in the Midwest.  But in the early-90s, the company filed for bankruptcy and closed all of its locations. The historic building on Woodward is now on the city’s demolition list after sitting vacant for decades.

But one Highland Park resident, Kira Thomas, is trying to save the signage on the building.  She spoke with WDET’s Bre’Anna Tinsley.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Kira Thomas:  I know the downtown area of Highland Park is definitely struggling, and I don’t want to slow down any progress or anything, but I do feel like it’s my favorite thing to look at on that strip of Woodward. So I just kind of truly don’t want it to end up in the trash. And also, I kind of do feel like people should see the value of restoring historical landmarks, and maybe not everyone would see that as a valuable historic landmark, but I still think it would be really cool to bring something back to its former glory.

I do feel like it should be converted into a Highland Park sign, so I want to just rescue the “Highland” part and then an “A” and a “P” to one day, hopefully be able to create the “R” and the “K”… to make it Highland Park.

Bre’Anna Tinsley: So what steps have you taken so far to try and save the Highland appliance sign?

KT: I have texted Mayor Glenda, she has not responded to me. I have called the city to kind of get an update on the permit, and they said that there hasn’t been a permit yet and that it will eventually go from Highland Park’s hands to Wayne County before the demo takes place. And that stuff kind of confuses me a little bit, so we’ll have to figure out a way to get more information on that.

And then somebody posted Aver Sign into the Reddit thread and said to call them. And so, I got a quote from them, and I just recently got that late Friday. And the quote is pretty high. It’s $5,800 roughly. 

I do feel like I’m going to call around to like one or two other places, because, you know, I was kind of thinking this would be in like the $2,000 to $3,000 region to bring it down and store it somewhere. So just trying to see if I can bring it to fruition.

But one of my ideas that somebody did also post on the Reddit thread is that there is somebody—the original owners were the Mondry family. And so I do feel like I’m going to try to call Josh Mondry, he’s a realtor in Birmingham right now, and see if he would be interested in also taking on this with me.

BT: So what has been the response from other residents?

KT:  I was at the mayor’s coffee chat, and I brought it up to someone there, and she’s been a resident for, I feel like, her whole life. And she was like, “Oh my gosh. Like, you know, that’d be amazing.” Like, I definitely know, shout out to Maurice Turner. He uses the Highland, the font of the sign for his T shirts for his nonprofit.

I don’t know. I’ve spoken to people and I’ve been like, “do you consider it to be an eyesore?”  And they’re like, well, not necessarily the sign part, like, you know, it’s just all these people have stories about it, and they always just remember walking into the whatever electronic they were about to buy, and, like, you know, stuff like that.