We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
Advertisements are so prevalent in New York’s urban landscape that they almost disappear from view. Plastered inside and outside subways, buses, and taxis, cycling through LinkNYC kiosks and bus shelters, they transform entire buildings into product placement. Each year, 50 million tourists from around the world flock to Times Square, not for a world-class museum or historic monument, but to stand in a glowing canyon of ads. Yet some billboards stand out, not because they’re the biggest or the brightest, but because they feature no color, no message, no light at all. Along with Sage and Coombe Architects in 2016, artist Alexa Hoyer began investigating these uncanny signs: empty frames and blank slates looming over highways and byways, with nothing to say. Like the Fallow Frames she recognized in empty tree pits at the Brooklyn-Queens border, these muted billboards telegraph a story of competing priorities. In a city with such deep ties to the industry, Aaron Kang Smithson writes, attempts to control the “blight” of outdoor advertising have been ambivalent and haphazard. Where even strongmen like Robert Moses or Andrew Cuomo failed to impose their will, a combination of federal pressure and happenstance has created rare pockets of visual silence.
At the edge of Gowanus, a trio of billboards looms over a cheerless patch of stone pavers marked as “Triangle Three Sixteen.” They are, at first glance, unremarkable. On one, the boxy digits of the Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots ($165 million and $215 million as of this writing) flicker faintly. Over an image of sunlight peeking past the curvature of the Earth, another conveys a simple didactic message: “In the beginning God created.” The third — perched along the short edge of the triangle — says nothing at all, its bare steel frame fossilized against the clouds.
As with many prosaic elements of the New York cityscape, this billboard composition is an outgrowth of heated debate, hard-fought legislation, and private profiteering. The blank billboard is an uncanny image in a city defined as much by its kinetic street life as by its commercial fervor. Like many others that line New York’s arteries today, it is the product of a decades-long battle over outdoor advertising. In the late 1930s, the City Planning Commission began to weigh a possible ban on billboards near highways, citing detraction from physical beauty and road safety as top concerns. The proposal faced stiff resistance from the outdoor advertising industry whose profits it threatened. The bosses of New York’s many regional and national outdoor advertising companies, as well as labor unions and real estate professionals, contended that the disappearance of New York’s roadside billboards would erode the First Amendment rights of advertisers, the jobs created by sign installation and maintenance, and the long-term financial viability of the industry as a whole. Restrictions of any kind were sure to be its death knell.
But the billboard ban was not without its own powerful allies. Civic associations, women’s groups, garden clubs, and art and architecture societies backed measures to limit the form and placement of outdoor advertising. The campaign gathered local political momentum. Robert Moses vocalized his support for the ban and staunchly criticized advertising moguls for hindering his efforts to beautify the city. Moses asserted: “There isn’t a bit of architecture or landscaping that is of the slightest value when you get into competition with them . . . They ruin everything we spend the taxpayers’ money on for improvement.”
By 1940, the Department of City Planning updated New York’s zoning code to include explicit limitations on billboards, watering down parts of the initial proposal in order to soften the potential economic blow to advertisers. The ordinance stated — as it still does today — that “no advertising sign shall be located . . . within 200 feet of an arterial highway or of a public park with an area of one-half acre or more.” The rule stipulated maximum surface areas for billboards and exempted “accessory signs,” or advertisements that promote businesses with which they share a parcel.
Enabled by lax enforcement and impelled by the prospect of ever larger financial windfalls, outdoor advertising companies continued to lease space from business owners within restricted zones across the city, constructing billboards and renting them out for promotional purposes. They often used loopholes like the accessory sign exception to erect these signs, later converting them to advertisements for off-site companies instead. From the mid- to late 20th century, even as the movement against outdoor advertising spurred national legislation to regulate roadside signage, these signs surfaced over many of New York’s buildings and parking lots, at intersections and interchanges, almost always fronting onto a major thoroughfare or highway.
In 1979, when the federal government warned that New York would lose $25 million in highway funding if it did not more strictly enforce its own outdoor advertising laws, the City Council grandfathered in the city’s 150 existing billboards instead, rendering them lawful. The flow of outdoor advertisements continued to accelerate. By the turn of the century, there were upwards of 600 billboards lining major roadways across the five boroughs, and billboard owners could earn as much as $2 million per year on a single sign.
It was not until 2001 that the City Council itself decided to rein in the industry, which had mostly consolidated into a small number of national players in the 1980s and 1990s. A 2004 law raised fines for noncompliance, which the Department of Buildings began enforcing in 2006. Today, companies who violate the ordinance are subject to charges of $25,000 per day and the revocation of their outdoor advertising licenses. In 2009, a group of billboard owners, led by Clear Channel Outdoor, sued the City for impingement of commercial free speech but lost on appeal. With that blow, many billboards within 200 feet of arterial highways were stripped of their messaging, leaving their barren faces and gridded skeletons to bask quietly in the sun.
Scrutiny of the outdoor advertising industry has continued in the wake of new penalties. In 2012, high winds toppled a billboard displaying the Mega Millions jackpot next to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, damaging several businesses and severing a gas line below. City officials determined that the billboard had defied the zoning code. Letitia James, then a member of the City Council, urged the Department of Buildings to inspect all billboards “for legality and safety.”
Seven years later, Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose administration had previously angered federal officials by erecting a slew of tourism-related billboards in contravention of national highway regulations, signed into law a bill to ban floating digital billboards launched on barges, calling them nuisances that “blight our shores and distract from the great natural beauty of our waterways.” New Yorkers need nothing less than “Times Square floating past us as we relax or play,” claimed the state senator who sponsored the bill. In centering the need to protect the physical beauty of the city, proponents of the ban echoed much of the language used 80 years earlier to justify the city’s first billboard prohibition. Unlike with highway signs, though, the empty remnants of Ballyhoo’s billboard barges do not linger.
In a city founded by Dutch traders and enriched by industry; home to many of the world’s largest advertising agencies by revenue; where ads bombard residents from the sides of buses and street kiosks and subway car interiors; where 50 million annual visitors pass through a canyon of screens with every salable message imaginable, the enduring effort to strike commercial messaging from the sides of highways comes as something of a surprise.
The contours of New York’s contentious relationship with outdoor advertising are in few places more legible than at Triangle Three Sixteen. Above the traffic island-turned-park, geometry and law have coalesced to produce different regulatory conditions for the intersection’s three signs, laying bare a protracted push-and-pull between profit and public interest. Far from New York’s most famous, well-worn, and contested public spaces, the trio of billboards at the edge of Gowanus sends a message that transcends any individual advertisement or absence thereof: that this is a city still trying to determine what kind of public space it wants.
The billboard displaying lottery jackpots, mounted atop a four-story tenement at the corner of 16th Street and Third Avenue, sits furthest from the arterial expressways that converge nearby. That chasm, measured at just over 200 feet, allows its owners to rent the sign to advertisers.
The billboard promoting creationism sits on an adjacent single-story building, just close enough to the Gowanus Expressway to prohibit it from garnering commercial profits. Between periods of intermittent blankness traceable on Google Maps, it has also served as an “accessory sign” for the garage door company at its base. The biblical message adorning the billboard today, paid for by the charity Christian Aid Ministries, likely utilizes another caveat of the law — that religious or nonprofit messaging does not constitute an advertisement.
The third billboard, a vacant behemoth grasping a rusted, free-standing column, is closest to the highway — a striking physical expression of the limbo beyond profitability. Dejected as it may appear, its presence still offers something valuable: in a city overwhelmed by the cacophony of the market, the blank billboard is a monument to one sphere in which the city has chosen silence.
All photos copyright Alexa Hoyer
The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.
