Permanent Holiday
Lighting in
Akron, OH

Akron was founded in 1825 by Simon Perkins and Paul Williams, and the name is adapted from the Greek akron, meaning summit or high point. The city sits at 945 feet on the western end of the plateau, and its topography runs to rolling hills and varied terrain. Height and slope decide how a roofline reads from the road.

A house on a rise shows its eave line to anyone approaching from below, while a house set down off the street shows mostly its ridge and very little of its fascia. Those are two different problems for a system that lives on the front of the house every day of the year.

The rubber era left Akron with something unusual for a city of 190,469 people at the 2020 census. Whole neighborhoods went up to a handful of repeating plans, Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park among them, built as mail-order plan houses. The gable pitches repeat, the eave heights repeat, and the fascia runs repeat down the block.

That cuts both ways. A clean horizontal line on one house reads as part of the architecture. The same line stopping three feet short of the corner reads as a mistake, because the neighbor's identical roof is sitting right there for comparison.

Then there is the snow. Akron averages 47.2 inches a season and the January average temperature is 27.9 degrees.

That number is most of the argument for a fixed system over an annual one. The weeks when a seasonal display most needs attention are the same weeks when nobody should be on a roof, and hardware that stays mounted moves every one of those decisions to a phone in a warm room.

Daylight is the other half of the question and it gets asked far less often than it should. Akron's older stock carries real detail, from the Oakdale Historic District to Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, and on a house with an ornamented cornice the interesting question is not what the lights do on December 20th. It is what the channel looks like at noon in April from the sidewalk.

A track color-matched to painted wood or aluminum trim genuinely disappears. Against a masonry frieze or a bracketed cornice it has nowhere to hide, and on those houses placement earns more than color match does.

Akron's calendar also runs a long way past December. The All-American Soap Box Derby, the National Hamburger Festival and First Night Akron on New Year's Eve all give a programmable system something honest to do in months when nothing is hung on a roof anywhere in Summit County.

That is the real separation between a holiday product and a lighting system. The same hardware carries plain warm white through February, one accent color for a school or a team through the fall, and everything else for about four days in December.

There is a local note worth raising before an order rather than after one. Akron neighborhoods vary widely in age and in whether a district designation applies to them, so whether any approval is needed before something is fixed to the front of a particular house is a question worth asking about that specific address. It costs a phone call, and the phone call is much cheaper at the start.