Security Signs in Chestnut Hill, PA

After a pleasant experience at Chestnut Hill Coffee Company on Sunday, I decided to walk around and take some photos. I usually just walk up and down Germantown Avenue, so today I decided to walk off the beaten path and hit some of the side streets instead.

Chestnut Hill is the sort of place where houses like these don't look out of place:

People have things like birdbaths and little ceramic animals in their yard. Everyone has beautiful flowers planted in their front lawn. At least one family even planted orchids. In West Philly, where I live, you're lucky to see geraniums, let alone lillies and orchids.

But every bit as plentiful as the flowers, I discovered, were signs for security companies. (those companies that install alarms on your doors and windows, and then they monitor activity from their remote office. If someone breaks in, they call the police for you.) It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that nearly every house had a sign out front. And even *more* amazing than that was that almost no two houses used the same security company!! Apparently so many people out here use these services to guard their homes that the area can support a veritable shitload of these companies! (This is very different from West Philly, where you see stickers on the front door of some houses, but you pretty much assume they're all fake, designed to scare burglars away.) It also made me wonder about status symbols. Clearly, HAVING a company (or at least a sign) wasn't a status symbol, because *everyone* has one. So i wondered if some of these companies were more "presigious" (read: expensive) than others? There were more ADT and Vector signs than the others, so I assume those are the cheap, low-end companies. Here are the signs I found:

TWENTY FOUR DIFFERENT SIGNS?!!! And that's just in the short time I walked up and down a few short side streets. Imagine if I'd explored the entire neighborhood! Oh, and for the "poor" people in Chestnut Hill who can't afford a security company, there are signs around the area that let you know that "this area protected by Neighborhood Watch." I took a pic of one of them, but forgot to upload it.

Oh, and not just security signs, but *fence* signs. I mean, there's a fence there, so you can't see how beautiful the actual yard is, right? so at least I can impress you by letting you know what company made my fence: