Eyesore or neighborhood character? As a set of St. Paul billboards come down, neighbors debate.

The billboards sat atop R.F. Moeller Jeweler, a family-run store, for decades, advertising glittering baubles, custom blinds and auto body services, among other things, to St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood.

Not anymore. A crane recently lowered them and cleared the view above the shop at Ford Parkway and Cleveland Avenue.

In a Facebook post, the company that’s operated at various locations in Highland Park since 1951, cited a desire to beautify the neighborhood in taking the signs down.

“We have permanently removed our billboards, creating a more open and welcoming space for everyone to enjoy,” the post said.

Mostly, neighbors who chimed in in the comments agreed that the billboards coming down is a step toward a nicer-looking neighborhood. A woman whose office window overlooked the signs thanked Moeller for the new view. Others reaffirmed their commitment to supporting the business as thanks. But not everyone agreed.

Billboards are a fixture of urban, suburban and rural landscapes across the Twin Cities metro and the state, a seen-yet-unseen part of the environment that mostly escapes scrutiny. Except when they don’t, such as the odd innuendo and the ubiquitous face of local real estate agent Kris Lindahl and the occasional flare-up in a long-running debate about where billboards should and should not be.

As for the R.F. Moeller billboards, some Facebook commenters were sad to see them go. One neighbor lamented the removal as a loss of vertical vibrancy in a commercial district of mostly squat buildings with just a couple stories. Another wondered if the billboards couldn’t have advertised other Highland businesses.

A third contingent said they never really noticed the signs.

R.F. Moeller has operated at its current Highland Park location since 2001, but company president Bob Moeller said family found contracts for the billboards on it dating back to the 1950s.

Recently, communications company Clear Channel owned and maintained the billboards, paying Moeller to lease the building’s roof space and funding its maintenance, Moeller said. When the lease was up recently, Moeller and his nephews, who are partners in the business, decided that despite the revenue they brought in, it was time for the billboards to go.

“It was pretty simple. Just a lot of clutter,” Moeller said. “It’s not nice to look at. It feels so much more commercial, rather than a neighborhood environment, to have a bunch of billboards up.”

Now that the signs are gone, some customers have noticed a change, but can’t put a finger on it, Moeller said.

“We’ve had people walk into the store and go, ‘Wow, hey, did you paint the front of your store or something?’” he said. “They didn’t even notice the billboards, but as soon as they were gone, they noticed the store.”

He noted that other billboards remain — though he couldn’t tell you what’s on them — across the street on the Highland Shopping Center.

John Mannillo, a real estate developer and Highland Park resident, said he was pleasantly surprised to learn the billboards atop R.F. Moeller were coming down.

In the 1990s, Mannillo was part of a group called Scenic Minnesota that gathered signatures to ask St. Paul voters to ban new billboards. The measure, opposed by billboard companies and in newspaper editorials, failed on a 53% to 47% vote. Still, efforts to tighten restrictions on billboards in St. Paul ultimately succeeded, with the city prohibiting new ones in the early 2000s, according to Star Tribune reporting at the time.

Today, the city’s roughly 270 billboards are “legally nonconforming,” or allowed to remain, but new billboards, with few exceptions, are not, said David Eide, an inspector for St. Paul’s Department of Safety and Inspections, who occasionally has to break it to people that they can’t build one.

“You can fix them to maintain them, to keep them there, but they just can’t be expanded and generally they can’t be moved,” he said.

In the ‘90s, billboard debates were happening around the metro. Minneapolis encouraged more signs along freeways and fewer in neighborhoods. Woodbury required the removal of some billboards along highways, while Rogers loosened restrictions. As many cities cracked down, signs proliferated along Interstate 35, heading up north.

Decades before that, First Lady Ladybird Johnson was instrumental in a crusade against billboards nationally. She advocated for the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, which restricted size and spacing of billboards on federal highways.

But not everyone thinks the giant advertisements detract from a neighborhood’s character.

Matt Clark, a longtime Highland Park resident who commented on R.F. Moeller’s Facebook post, is one of them.

Reached by phone, Clark said New York City’s Times Square was on his mind after the opening of the musical “Wicked” in movie theaters. “Go to Broadway and stand at 42nd and Times Square and just turn and spin and think to yourself, ‘Wow, this is vibrant,’” he said.

At R.F. Moeller, he liked the parade of ads towering over the corner, and remembered seeing a neighborhood kid’s photo on one of the billboards in an ad for Highland Catholic School.

“You’d see so many fun things. And now you look up and you just see sky,” he said. “I’m not at the corner of Ford Parkway and Cleveland to see sky.”