HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON -- IT is hard to miss the 34 eye-high signs that have popped up all over town; watching passers-by stop in their tracks to inspect them makes that clear.
Each is emblazoned with historical photos and two paragraphs of text, one in English, the other in Spanish. They are part of a program called Museum in the Streets, which the Hastings Historical Society says it is using to try to stimulate interest in the village's past.
''We see this as a gift to the community,'' said Barbara Thompson, the society's president. ''We also hope that it brings people in to do further research. We get lonely in here sometimes.''
The signs are also intended to foster a modest form of heritage tourism -- which local merchants are doing their bit to encourage: Store patrons can pick up a brochure with a brief history of the village and a map for a walking tour that loops around the downtown area. ''It's designed to be a win-win-win situation,'' said Patrick Cardon, the museum consultant who came up with the Museum in the Streets idea. ''It's good politically, educationally and commercially. We hope people will linger, look around and visit local businesses, so it's not just the historical society or the tourism office getting involved, it's the pizza parlor and the video store, too.''
Mr. Cardon, who lives in Cushing, Me., made the local connection through his wife, Carol, a trustee of the Andrus on Hudson senior center and a descendant of the Andrus family. She suggested the program to the historical society and Mr. Cardon came down to pitch the idea.
Several communities in Maine have installed the signs, beginning with Thomaston, in 2002. Hastings is the first municipality in New York State to embrace the project. Mr. Cardon says he is speaking with other towns in states from South Carolina to Texas.
Most of Hastings's signs are on village land. The Board of Trustees approved the plan with little debate and directed the Department of Public Works to install the signs free of charge, said Sue Smith, a historical society trustee. The total cost, around $22,000, is being covered by grants and private donations raised by the historical society.
Though the venture is not intended to make a profit, Mr. Cardon sells the rustproof, bulletproof and graffiti-resistant signs, which carry a 10-year warranty. His goal, he said, is quality control.
''I'm trying to create a museum-quality experience, where visitors are supposed to focus on the picture, not whether the label is crooked,'' he said. ''I don't want anyone to notice a chipped sign or a rust spot.''
He also insists that the signs be bilingual. The second language on the signs in Maine is French, because of the large numbers of visitors from Quebec. Hastings adopted Spanish, to reflect the growth in the Hispanic population and to complement the new emphasis on Spanish in local schools, Ms. Smith said.
Some signs convey little-known historical facts. From the one near Hastings's modest municipal building, for instance, the reader learns that it was designed by Shreve & Lamb, the architectural firm behind the Empire State Building. A sign on Washington Avenue explains that in 1912, guards at a copper wire factory on the Hudson shore in the village shot into a crowd of strikers, killing one. Still other signs depict the grand mansions that predated today's houses and apartment buildings.
The endeavor took a year and a half, most of it spent deciding on the signs' content and their placement, Ms. Smith said. Volunteers selected the photographs from the society's unusually rich collection. Almost half the signs bear the work of Arthur Langmuir, who toted his camera around town in the 1920's and 1030's and documented village life in an effort to expose poor conditions.
The text was written by David W. McCullough, a historical society trustee who is a professional writer (and is often confused with the David McCullough who wrote bestselling works like ''1776'').
There are also signs highlighting the fact that Hastings has been home to a number of famous figures. Among them are the nation's first naval admiral, David Farragut; the theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld; the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger; the photographer Lewis Hine; the painter Jasper Cropsey; and the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. The Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi also spent time here.
One of Mr. Cardon's goals, he says, is to connect the localities that adopt his program with broader currents of history. Another is to puncture the stereotype of the sterile suburb.
''Even though this is a small village,'' Mr. McCullough said, ''if you scratch the surface a little bit, you find out there's lots of layers of history here.''
Photos: Historical markers have popped up all over Hastings, thanks to the efforts of, from left, David McCullough, Sue Smith and Barbara Thompson, among others. (Photographs by Alan Zale for The New York Times)