A large rooftop sign was installed today at 87 North Main Street, part of a new downtown business project from longtime Moab restaurant owner Will Petty. The steel-framed sign, mounted above the roofline, is the first to go up under a recent change to Moab’s sign code approved in January.
“I love this old-school vernacular where signs are mounted on roofs on funky metal structures,” Petty said during a Jan. 28 Moab City Council meeting. “What makes sense is to let a property owner say, ‘Look, I want my main sign to be on my roof,’ and so treat it like the main freestanding sign the ordinance talks about.”
Petty, who owns the Jailhouse Café, is opening a new café called Elsie’s Old World Cafe adjacent to Back of Beyond Books. He said placing the sign on the roof avoids disrupting an adjacent lot he hopes to use for outdoor dining.
Previously, roof-mounted signs were treated as secondary to freestanding signs and restricted in height and size. But a zoning code amendment—Ordinance 2025-01—now allows roof-mounted signs to follow the same rules as freestanding signs in commercial zones, provided they meet the same height and area standards.
Community Development Director Cory Shurtleff clarified during the meeting that the amendment did not open the door to enormous signage: “We are not looking to allow for a sign to be an additional 28 feet on top of an already 30-foot building—that is not what the applicant is proposing, and that is not what the code would allow.”
Council member Kaitlin Myers framed the change as a public-responsive update to city regulations. “I just see this as a really good example of working with the public to make our codes actually usable,” she said during the discussion.
Petty described plan for Elsie’s as a “European/American-retro-style restaurant serving coffee, treats and light meals” with outdoor seating right on one of Moab’s busiest downtown corners. According to sign painter Nick Garrett, the project took about 13 months in the design and planning phases.
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