Tip of the Iceberg
Posted May 4th, 2005 by eliot
The NY City Council recently closed a “loophole” that allowed over 1,000 illegal advertising billboards to spring up around the city. Closing the loophole is a small (tiny, miniscule) step in the right direction. The New York Press puts it in perspective:
Billboards in Times Square are one thing—they’ve always been part of the landscape. But in recent years, they’ve spread like the mange across the rest of the city, adorning every street, the side of every building, blocking the sky with yet one more advertisement for underpants or flavored vodka. You can’t look in any direction these days, it seems, without being assaulted by another giant ad.
Over 1000 of those billboards, it turns out, have been put up illegally, without being properly registered with the Buildings Department. But last Thursday, City Council announced that they’d finally closed a massive loophole in a 2001 law, and will now be able to get on with the business of getting these billboards removed.
For just a second there it sounded like good news. At last we’d once again be able to let our eyes drift upward without being told to buy something we didn’t need.
Then that second passed, and we remembered where we were, who was mayor, and that when those illegal billboards are removed, they’ll be replaced in a matter of minutes by legal billboards, probably for the Olympics.
Photo taken from Billboard Liberation Front.
May 4th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
i wonder how much of this effort to curb “illegal” billboards was influenced by Vista(?), ClearChannel, and other advertising giants???
They may just wanna monopoly in the market
May 16th, 2005 at 6:26 am
Dude if it was influenced by these advertising giants do really think they want ppl 2 fill there
board with ‘illeagal billboards’ They wouldnt be able to control the monopoly even if they did
try to curb them off!