A rooftop sign that has been confusing Milwaukee-bound airline passengers for decades.
Being bored in your studio on a Wednesday is probably just normal routine for a photographer. Anyway, that’s exactly what happened to Mark Gubin back in 1978, but then he got a perky idea. He decided to take a tub of white paint and write out ‘Welcome to Cleveland’ in big block letters on his rooftop, despite the fact that his studio was located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The rooftop with the sign lines right up with the flight path to runway 19 at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. For decades, passengers travelling this flight path have been perplexed by the sign, often ringing their attendant call buttons just to double-check they’re arriving in the right city.
Gubin’s studio and home, a defunct single-screen theatre off of Delaware Avenue in Milwaukee – atop which the sign sits – encompasses several enormous rooms packed with countless collectibles, from a Civil War-era cannon to millennia-old Roman artifacts. By way of explanation, Gubin once off-handedly noted in an interview that he “worked for Smithsonian for a while.”
Gubin’s ‘Welcome to Cleveland’ sign has garnered years of notoriety for him, making him go all the way to the Today show, and publications like the Huffington Post, GQ, Slate, Daily Mail, Yahoo, among others. “It just keeps coming around,” explains Gubin. “It will not go away. Every now and then I’ll go online and look up my name and I get an incredible number of hits.”
In 2021, a man in Sydney, Australia painted a “Welcome to Perth” sign on the roof of his own business, inspired by Gubin’s sign.
Flying to Milwaukee Airport anytime soon? Remember to peep out the window and look for Gubin’s “Welcome to Cleveland” sign. If you see it, you are sure to be in Milwaukee.
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