India Basin Concrete Letters

The India Basin Concrete Letters once defined the entrance to the India Basin Industrial Park. Designed in nineteen seventy-eight by graphic artist Michael Manwaring, these eighteen individual concrete sculptures spelled out the name of the park along a grassy berm on Third Street. They stood as prominent examples of the nineteen seventies Supergraphic Movement, a design trend that favored bold, oversized lettering and monumental aesthetics to transform public spaces. Rather than a single static sign, Manwaring created each letter as a free-standing, three-dimensional sculpture. He chose the Helvetica typeface, which was considered revolutionary at the time, and opted for a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters to ensure the installation felt approachable rather than imposing. The project was born from a modest twenty-five hundred dollar budget and a desire to turn a utilitarian industrial gateway into a piece of public art. The letters were removed in two thousand twenty to make way for the new Southeast Community Center. Their demolition was a tense event, with heavy machinery carefully hoisting the one-ton concrete blocks. While many of the letters were damaged during the process, they were preserved rather than destroyed, and they now sit in storage, awaiting potential future use in local park signage.