By Mark Wineka
Salisbury Post
It takes the two-man city crew of Victor Smith and Paul Parrish about 15 minutes per street corner to bring down the old and put up the new.
Smith and Parrish began erecting Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue ground signs Tuesday afternoon to replace the Boundary Street signs between Bringle Ferry Road and Jake Alexander Boulevard.
The city has made roughly 23 Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue signs, which measure 5 feet long and 9 inches high, not counting the larger overhead signs at major intersections such as Innes Street and Jake Alexander Boulevard.
The overhead signs (at four signalized intersections) also will be changed out from Boundary to King in the near future.
On corners where the sign of the cross street is the old standard of 6 inches high, Smith and Parrish are replacing those signs with 9-inch-high versions. The city makes its street signs in-house.
“You’re confusing everybody,” a woman driver joked with Parrish as she drove by the East Lafayette Street intersection with Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue Tuesday.
“We don’t know which way to go.”
Salisbury City Council approved the name change in honor of the slain civil rights leader late last year and made the change effective on the nationally observed holiday for King Monday.
“We’ve known it was coming and have been trying to prepare for it,’ said Rick Eldridge, executive director of the Rufty-Holmes Senior Center, now of 1120 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave.
Eldridge said the senior center actually hasn’t received anything official from either the U.S. Post Office or the city of Salisbury to inform it of the address change. He’s just going by all the newspaper reports, Eldridge acknowledged.
The senior center already has changed the address on its Web site. And as stationery and other items are reordered, Eldridge has been changing to the new King address.
But the city has thrown him a bit of a curve, Eldridge said, by putting the “N” and “S” for either north or south at the end of the street name, not the beginning. The directional initials for Boundary Street were at the front of the street name, he noted.
City staff members have said that 79 properties, which represent 210 different addresses, are affected by the name change.
The new street sign was unveiled Monday at the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast, held at the Civic Center, whose address also will change because of the new name.
Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263 or mwineka@salisburypost.com.