Sometimes the really deadpan pranks are the best ones. Waaaay back in the 1970s an artist and photographer named Mark Gubin, living near Milwaukee Airport and realizing that his abode was situated on a common approach path for landing airplanes, painted the words “WELCOME TO CLEVELAND” in huge white letters on his building’s flat and entirely black roof. For the geographically illiterate out there, Milwaukee is in Wisconsin, which does not even border Ohio, the state that contains Cleveland. (Full disclosure: Cleveland is the city in which I currently live.) The two cities are 335 miles apart as the crow flies—roughly a seven-hour drive.

Gubin painted the sign after his assistant casually remarked that, given his location, it would be nice to welcome incoming passengers to the city. But Gubin had an even better idea….

According to a 1985 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, there used to be a Northwest Airlines route from Denver to Cleveland that used Milwaukee as a layover, and the airline was obliged to pre-emptively reassure passengers via the PA system that they should not worry—the plane had not skipped the intermediate destination.

Gubin’s quotations in that article are priceless. One of them goes, “There’s not a real purpose for having this here except madness, which I tend to be pretty good at.” He also said, “It was all tongue-in-cheek, just for fun. Living in the world is not a dress rehearsal. You better have fun with it.” That’s for sure.

Lest you wonder whether a prank painted on a roof that appeared in a 2005 edition of a Milwaukee newspaper is still in force, worry not, according to Google Maps, the prank is still in full effect, as this screen shot (with a 2015 copyright) establishes (click on the picture for a better view).
 

 
via GQ