The Bronx is one of the five boroughs of New York City. So its streets are full of advertisements with various types of typography and styles, whether they are serif and sans serif, old style, transitional, modern, and script that send us messages that can confuse us a bit about how we perceive the neighborhood itself.

I think this is because the Bronx has been a neighborhood that for the last 20 years has gone through and is going through a series of large-scale changes resulting in the coming together of two completely different ways of life.

Gentrification is a process where the poorest neighborhoods of the cities are “reformed” to make them habitable for people of higher social and economic classes, this in the Bronx is at its highest point and can be seen more clearly in places like Bruckner Boulevard, Parkchester, etc. Where the fusion of the new and old is seen with the naked eye and with this is also the advertisements because they are focused on two different social classes. 

I live in a neighborhood in the Bronx called Morris Park. It is a neighborhood close to what is known as the suburbs because it is far north of the Bronx. This area has been a victim of gentrification, where now its population is white, Asian, and Hispanic middle and upper middle class, making this neighborhood one of the richest in the Bronx. In my neighborhood when walking you can see an incredible number of advertisements of all kinds. However, there is something very curious about these advertisements, many of them are sans serif, old style, and transitional, but they are those that have been in Morris Park the longest, are usually very sober, without colors and very traditional fonts belonging to places such as clinics, dentists, banks, etc. But the new places enjoy a number of colorful advertisements that attract the eye’s sight due to their very modern calligraphies that move away from the traditional.

The oldest advertisements have very traditional designs and typography, they clearly look as if they had been designed 15-20 years ago, despite the fact that they did not generate great emotion, the messages were direct to the point, and they communicated perfectly what the company or venue did or offered and was easy to read, full of transitional typography and sans serif.

The new advertisements were clearly aimed at a younger audience and in many cases an upper-income audience, they featured lots of colors and typography that looked like it was done by hand, either handwritten or something more youthful like a cartoon for the kids. different locations. In the same way, the messages were very clear, and without seeing or entering the premises you knew what they were selling or offering without difficulty in understanding.