It’s just as well the “Last Train to Clarksville” left the station in the 1960s (according to The Monkees pop group anyway) because there are probably no train tracks left in this Tennessee city. 

By now they will have all been torn up to make way for more roads, more takeaway food bars, more liquor merchants - and signs!

Apparently the takeaway food signs and the tyre company signs and all the rest have become so prolific in parts of Clarksville that some people in the city are talking about “blighted” parts of town in relation to signage - not just run-down houses and buildings.

Face the fact, they say, the view in parts of town is UGLY.

Signs of every shape, size, height, and digitalized flashing technology are a major distraction to drivers, and a garish display more suited to early Las Vegas of the rat pack era, when Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra were kings and cigarette smoking was considered good for your health!

Clarkesville residents were recently urged to drive down some of the more built-up streets and arterials of Clarkesville to see “a landscape of utility poles scattered like pick-up-sticks, a tangle of wires and electrical towers, a no-rhyme-nor-reason display of signage. Few if any berms, minimal greenspace. Absence of anything but token saplings. Acres of dealer lots and parking lots reflecting summer heat and glare, which when combined with an onslaught of traffic, exhaust and pavement are major factors that help push the seasonal heat index to unmanageable and even dangerous levels and create the stench of air pollution via auto-exhaust.
“It is irresponsible. When studies indicate that planned road improvements to be completed 20 years down the road still won’t be enough to handle traffic, it’s time to step back, hit the brakes hard, and rethink the community as a whole.

Original reporting by Christine Anne Piesyk, Clarksville TN Online).