South San Francisco repainted its century-old hillside sign red, blue, and white for the America 250 commemoration — deliberately scrambling the color order to protect the city's identity, only to inadvertently make "San Francisco" invisible from the highway.

On Sign Hill in South San Francisco, the ninety-seven-year-old concrete letters that announce "South San Francisco The Industrial City" to anyone coming up the Peninsula on the 101 got a new look this month: red on top, blue in the middle, white on the bottom, applied over two days in early June by approximately 75 volunteers.

The project — funded by Genentech, and cleared by the South San Francisco Planning Commission on May 21 via a Certificate of Alteration required by the sign's 1996 listing on the National Register of Historic Places — was tied to the America 250 commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The color order, though, isn't red, white, and blue. It's red, blue, white — a deliberate inversion. City Communications Manager Angenette Lau explained the choice to the San Mateo Daily Journal: in a conventional red-white-blue scheme, "San Francisco" — the middle two words of the sign — would be rendered in white and would stand out most prominently from a distance. The city didn't want the words "San Francisco" to be the loudest part of a South San Francisco landmark. So they pushed the blue into the middle and the white to the bottom.

What they got: from a distance, the blue tier disappears into the sky. Drivers heading north see "SOUTH" in red at the top, a gap where "SAN FRANCISCO" used to be readable, and "THE INDUSTRIAL CITY" in white below. The sign, as several observers noted on r/bayarea this week, reads more or less as "South — The Industrial City," which is either an accident or an unusually direct statement of civic identity, depending on your generosity.

The sign has a long history of color experiments, most of them unauthorized — the city's news release is at pains to note that unsanctioned alteration of the letters is explicitly prohibited. The original 1923 version was a whitewashed job commissioned by the South San Francisco Chamber of Commerce for $300; the current Gunite-sprayed concrete letters, applied over a steel frame, went up in 1929 for $4,845. Individual letters stand between 48 and 65 feet tall. Sign Hill Park, which contains the sign, is owned and maintained by the city; the Planning Commission has held alteration authority since the historic designation.

Genentech, headquartered on the flats of South San Francisco directly below Sign Hill, covered the repainting costs — the company cited both the America 250 anniversary and its own 50th year. The city characterized the treatment as reversible and said it posed no risk to the underlying concrete.

The sign will return to white eventually. Until then, look north from the 101 on a clear morning: "South" in red, a blue band dissolving into the sky, "The Industrial City" in white. Everything it always said — you just have to work a little harder to find San Francisco in it.