The supergraphic sign above for the movie “Prince of Persia” on a Westwood office building is legally permitted as an on-site sign, which the L.A. sign code defines as a sign directing attention to a product or service generally sold or offered on the premises where the sign is located. There is no movie theater in the Wilshire Blvd. building, or the offices of the movie production company, so how can the sign be considered legally equivalent to the sign on the local hardware store or dry cleaners?

For an answer, one most go back more than a decade, when Michael McNeilly (the self-proclaimed artist responsible for the giant statue of liberty images around the city) put one of the “Lady Liberty” images on the side of the building at 10921 Wilshire Blvd. He was charged by the city with putting up the supergraphic without a permit, as well as violating a local zoning prohibition on any such signs in the Wilshire corridor from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica.

While that case worked its way through the court, McNeilly changed the sign to one he claimed to be a memorial to the New York firefighters who died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center collapse. Again, he was cited by the city, and this time filed a lawsuit in federal court with the aid of the ACLU, which asserted that McNeilly’s First Amendment right to free speech allowed him to erect the sign without city interference. Two years later, then L.A. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo agreed to a settlement of that lawsuit that allowed McNeilly to keep signs on the 12-story wall of the building, as long as those signs fit the city’s definition of “on-site” signs.

According to the settlement, only current tenants of the building with “bona fide office space” conducting “bona fide business” would be allowed to place messages on the signs. Furthermore, those tenants would have to provide proof to the city that they were conducting such a business by having an employee present during normal working hours.

Yesterday, we went to the office at mid-afternoon with a local community activist who has tried in the past to convince the city’s building department that the various signs that have been put up on the wall do not comply with those requirements. On the sixth floor, there was an office with the sign, “Sky Posters, a Creative Service Agency” beside the door. (Sky Posters is one of the terms used by McNeilly, who is president of a company called Skytag, Inc.) The door was locked, and knocks went unanswered. We spoke to a woman who was going into the office next door, and she said that in the four years she worked there she had never seen anyone enter or leave the Sky Posters office.

As we’ve pointed out in previous posts, McNeilly is a fraud. He claims to be an artist defending freedom of expression when the obvious fact that he is an entrepreneur making millions by putting up supergraphic signs wherever he can find willing property owners and then suing to block enforcement of the city’s ban on such signs. He has used one of the country’s most revered images—the statue of liberty—as a placeholder for signs hawking movies, TV shows, and other corporate products.

In 2008, he put up a huge “Lady Liberty” image on the opposite end of the Wilshire Blvd. building, and then sued the city in federal court and succeeded in getting a judge to order a preliminary injunction protecting it from city enforcement. Lady Liberty is long gone, of course, and now a Nike Ad featuring a 10-story image of Kobe Bryant greets pedestrians and motorists navigating the single most heavily-trafficked intersection in the entire city of L.A.

Nike ad featuring Kobe Bryant on east end of building. Credit: Curbed LA

Based on statements by media buyers and ad agency professionals, advertisers pay upwards of $100,000 a month for supergraphics like that in those kind of locations.

The “Prince of Persia” supergraphic on the west end of the building, visible from the 405 freeway almost half a mile away, made news two days ago when Curbed LA reported that the building owner was speaking out against a proposed development across the street that would block some views of the sign, including the one from the freeway. A statement, perhaps, on how valuable those views are for a sign that is “on-site” in name only.

via How Was This Eight-Story Supergraphic Ad For a Movie Permitted as an “On-Site” Sign?.

Related posts:

1. Office Tenants Plagued by Series of Illegal Supergraphic Signs; Do the L.A. City Attorney and District Councilman Care?
2. Owner Arrested For Hollywood Supergraphic Previously Cited For Sign Law Violations
3. Sign Companies, Property Owners, Advertising Agencies, Major Corporations Thumb Their Noses at L.A.’s New Off-Site Sign Ban

Friday night’s arrest of Kayvan Setareh for allowing an 8-story supergraphic ad to be wrapped across three sides of an historic Hollywood building was not the first time the Pacific Palisades man has run afoul of the city’s sign code, according to building department records. In January, 2007, a citation was issued for an illegal supergraphic on the building at 6777 Hollywood Blvd, and In November, 2006, citations were issued for a total of four illegal supergraphics on another building owned by Setareh at 5858 Hollywood Blvd. As reported by the L.A. Times, the arrest of Setareh followed concerns that because there was no inspection of the gigantic ad’s attachment to the building it could come loose and cause injury to pedestrians and motorists in the busy street below.

via Owner Arrested For Hollywood Supergraphic Previously Cited For Sign Law Violations.

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1. Office Tenants Plagued by Series of Illegal Supergraphic Signs; Do the L.A. City Attorney and District Councilman Care?
2. Sign Industry: “The Law is interfering with my illegal income!!”
3. NYT: DoB Removes sign with 103 violation notices

BC Biermann, a PhD Assistant Professor of Film/Media Studies California Baptist University – Riverside has recently published a paper on “Spatial Distributions of Power: Illegal Billboards as Graffiti in Los Angeles.” In it he argues…

“While graffiti has regularly been prosecuted as form of vandalism, illegal billboards have not. Illegal billboards are generally defined as panels for the display of advertisements in public places (such as alongside highways or on the sides of buildings) that have not received the legal permits and safety inspections; panels that display ads not related to structure or property they are affixed to may also quality as “unlawful.” It is my contention that illegal billboards are a form of graffiti and, as a result, should be prosecuted as a form of vandalism.”

In this paper, Mr. Biermann comes to some conclusions that have informed our practice here at PublicAdCampaign for years. In fact, he calls upon the NYSAT project (without credit) as an example of civil disobedience that attempts to challenge commercial control of public messages while promoting a more just public arena, interested in promoting individual identity and citizen directed spatial control.

I highly suggest reading the paper, but if you don’t have the time, I’ll leave you with the final 2 sentences.

In this way, via a constant bombardment of a hegemonic truth, corpo-political regimes control the means by which individuals seek to know, decipher, and act on themselves. Acting as if they were free in within a liberal, democratic system of rule, the good consumer citizen is calculatedly and spatially constructed.

Indeed, this is truly about who we are and who we want to be as people and a society. When our influences come from the corporate machine, we have a hard time defining for ourselves the truths with which we would like to live.

via Public Ad Campaign: Should OAC’s Be Subject To The Same Penalties Grafitti Writers Face?.

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2. Public Ad Campaign’s Recent Five
3. Public Ad Campaign: Newest PAC Work

One: who owns the street sign posts

This morning I rode my bike to a not-so-close subway stop because I had to run into Manhattan for a meeting and make another meeting in Brooklyn right after that one. And I was late. I get to the station, find a street sign to lock up to, and the guy hawking the Daily News comes up to me yelling. He tells me that is his sign, and that he is going to lock up his newspaper rack AND stool to it, and I have to go find somewhere else. I tell him he doesn’t own the street sign and start locking up, and he says that if I do that he will simply lock his rack up around my bike and I will not be able to get it out. And I’m running late.

As I scuffled off around the corner to find another street sign on the next block my head was full of expletives, but now, sitting on the ferry to Staten Island I am a bit more calm about it, but I have nagging questions: who owns the space. Who has the right to lock what to signs. Are the rights of individuals different than those of corporations. What about corporations acting via pseudo-independent citizens like the Daily News guy. And what is the answer in principle, what is the law’s answer, and how wide is the gap?

Two: obeying the law like an obedient dog.

I ride the Staten Island ferry three times a week to teach at the College of Staten Island. Sometimes I am on bicycle (not as often this semester as I would like) and usually I have a backpack full of books, student papers and my daily rations for my excursion into the crypto-suburbs. Almost every time I pass through the threshold of security I am eyed by the man with the bomb dog. About half of the time he asks me to take my bag off and let his dog inspect it. But every time one of the bomb-dog-men tells me to take off my bag for inspection he says it as if I should already know that I was supposed to take it off for him.

Today I’m running late (its the theme for today) and I am trotting towards the door to the downstairs bikes-only segregated waiting area in my bike shoes (which means I can’t go very fast), and the man yells out “Hey! You!” and points at me. He is jogging over to me. He simply points to the ground. I’ve done this enough times that I have internalized this procedure. I remove my bag and put it on the floor. Take two steps back. You always have to step back from the bag — as if it is a bomb… The dog sniffs it for 10 seconds. Walks back to his master, and the master walks away.

It is amazing that I have been interpolated into the bomb-dog-man’s vocabulary of power. He calls out short commands, I stop, and respond. He points to the ground. I know what the command means, and do as commanded. I am an obedient, well disciplined dog in the dog master’s control society.

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2. James Howard Kunstler on Public Space
3. Public Ad Campaign’s Recent Five

Almost a year after the L.A. City Council approved a moratorium on new off-site and supergraphic signs, and four months after it replaced that temporary measure with a permanent ban, advertisers and sign companies continue to wrap, hang, and otherwise display their multi-story supergraphic signs on the walls of buildings throughout the city.

So why are property owners and sign companies willing to risk open violation of the law, and advertising agencies and major corporations willing to look the other way?  The answer is easy to surmise from the fact that a large supergraphic in a high-traffic location can generate upwards of $50,000 in monthly revenue, while the maximum fine for violating sign law provisions is $100 a day.

The City Attorney’s office has filed at least two civil suits under a public nuisance provision that allows fines of up to $2,500 a day, but those lawsuits are slowly moving through the courts and any resolution is likely to be months away, if not longer, depending upon appeals.

In the meantime, absent any sudden displays of social and civic responsibility on the part of the outdoor advertising industry, expect to see the city’s public spaces occupied by more and more of these huge sales pitches demanding the attention of everyone driving, walking, bicycling or otherwise moving past them.

via Sign Companies, Property Owners, Advertising Agencies, Major Corporations Thumb Their Noses at L.A.’s New Off-Site Sign Ban.

Related posts:

1. Sign Industry: “The Law is interfering with my illegal income!!”
2. Oakland’s Ban on “Visual Blight” Upheld in Court
3. Judge Says 2006 Lawsuit Settlement Allowing Digital Billboards in L.A. is Illegal, Calls Agreement Between City and Billboard Companies “Poison”

Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, New York; what big city has the outdoor advertising industry under control?

Last March, we reported on the case of an illegal supergraphic sign advertising Chase Bank installed over the second-floor office windows of a building at 7201 Melrose Ave. The city issued a citation to the building owner, Macculloch Properties of Brentwood, and in May referred that citation to the City Attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. The sign was then removed, but replaced in August by one advertising the TV show, Melrose Place. Then in October, a third supergraphic sign went up, this one advertising HTC cellphones. As of this writing, the sign was still in place.

Read the rest at: Office Tenants Plagued by Series of Illegal Supergraphic Signs; Do the L.A. City Attorney and District Councilman Care?.

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1. New York City’s Struggle to Take Down Illegal Billboards
2. NYT: City Room Blog – Ad or Art? Chanel’s 2.55 vs. Zoning’s C5-3
3. City fights illegal gig posters with CANCELLED stickers

The billboard industry is—obviously—in the business of getting messages across.

This they have managed to do, with a vengeance.

In anticipation of today's City Council debate on a proposed new billboard bylaw and tax, the billboard industry has been using its own platform to communicate its deep opposition to these measures. The Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada (OMAC), which represents the vast majority of billboard companies operating in Toronto, launched this campaign last week, setting aside 139 billboards for the cause.

Inconveniently, it turns out that at least two of these 139 billboards have been deemed illegal by the City. As pointed out and explained to us by Rami Tabello of Illegal Signs, both are in violation of existing regulations and neither should be doing what they are doing, namely expressing just how aggrieved and put-upon the billboard industry is feeling.

And this, say public-space activists, is precisely the point.

[snip]

The proposed regulations will not eliminate billboards, and they aren’t trying to. Nobody is attempting to strangle the industry to death, stamp out all billboards across the land, or otherwise start a revolution. The City has every right to govern what goes on in our public spaces, and it has every obligation to be a good steward of those spaces, balancing the commercial interests of the industry and the property owners to whom billboard companies pay rent with the civic interests of the majority of Torontonians, 70% of whom support this tax according to a recent poll [PDF].

Nobody likes to be forced to play by the rules. That doesn’t make refereeing an unfair practice.

via Billboard Companies Protest Billboard Tax…On Illegal Billboards – Torontoist.

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1. Judge Says 2006 Lawsuit Settlement Allowing Digital Billboards in L.A. is Illegal, Calls Agreement Between City and Billboard Companies “Poison”
2. New York City’s Struggle to Take Down Illegal Billboards
3. NYT vs. SF Examiner on illegal storefront billboards

According to the City’s Lobbyist Registry, billboard industry lobbyists have had over 80 closed door meetings with City Councillors in the past month alone.

As a result, IllegalSigns.ca has designed, manufactured and is now distributing these custom-made products to all members of City Council who are documented to have come into contact with a billboard industry lobbyist.

via » Free Billboard Lobbyist Sanitizer Now Available for All Members of Council ::: illegalsigns.

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“Chicago’s landscape is being swamped by a sea of unsightly billboards, advertising benches and illegal signs because of a toothless zoning ordinance that city officials admit cannot be enforced.”

Change is all around us, but in Chicago some things never change. Things like the above opening sentence, which I wrote 22 years ago for a front-page feature on how our city was being overrun with billboard blight.

He then explains how loopholes have enabled illegal signs to exist in Chicago for decades. He then talks about a new group, the Coalition Against Sign Pollution, who are looking to close the loopholes with a moratorium on outdoor signs:

Attorney Charles Levesque, a CASP founding member, said a ban would be legal because virtually all signs of any size are a “special use” under the zoning code and require a city permit. “It’s not a guaranteed right.” As for 1st Amendment issues, he points out that four states — Vermont, Hawaii, Maine and Alaska — have banned billboards altogether.

You can read the whole piece, City losing war against sight blight here.

Related posts:

1. Oakland’s Ban on “Visual Blight” Upheld in Court
2. Billboard industry gums up anti-blight enforcement in S.F.
3. New York City’s Struggle to Take Down Illegal Billboards

With a wave of business closures in New York, store fronts are being converted over to street level billboards with little regard for New York City’s sign laws. In these tough economic times it seems cheap adhesive vinyl and corporate crime lose to city permits and legal billboards in the corporate cost-benefit analysis. While they make a buck, we can “take a field trip to the peanutarium.”

Related posts:

1. Public Ad Campaign’s Recent Five
2. Public Ad Campaign’s Recent Five
3. New York City’s Struggle to Take Down Illegal Billboards