A Highland Park resident wants to save the old Highland Appliance sign before the building comes down

The old Highland Appliance store on Woodward Avenue has sat vacant for decades, and it is now on Highland Park's demolition list. Before the building comes down, one resident is trying to rescue the part of it that still reads as a landmark: the sign.

Kira Thomas wants to pull the lettering off the storefront and give it a second life. Her idea, as she described it to WDET, is to keep the "Highland" portion plus an "A" and a "P," then add an "R" and a "K" to spell out "Highland Park." A piece of a defunct appliance chain would become a marker for the city it was named after.

"I don't want it to end up in the trash," Thomas told WDET reporter Bre'Anna Tinsley, in the station's "Crossing the Lines" series on Highland Park. "I think it would be really cool to bring something back to its former glory."

The name carries more local history than the empty building suggests. Highland Appliance was founded in Highland Park in 1933 by Harry Mondry, the first store in what grew into one of the country's larger consumer electronics and appliance chains. By the time the company went public in 1985 it ran more than 80 stores across the Midwest, second in size among American electronics retailers behind Circuit City, per its corporate history. The chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992 and liquidated its remaining stores the next year, leaving the Highland Park storefront and its sign behind.

Saving the sign is not free, and the path runs through city and county process. Thomas told WDET that an early estimate of $2,000 to $3,000 to remove the lettering came back closer to $5,800, and that a demolition permit for the building had not yet been issued and would eventually pass from Highland Park to Wayne County. She said she had texted the mayor without a response.

This is WDET's reporting, and the details of Thomas's effort come from her interview with the station. Read the full piece at WDET. If the sign does come down intact, the question Thomas is raising is whether the letters are worth keeping at all, or whether a neighborhood lets one more piece of its own name end up in a dumpster.