Monday, August 6th, 2007 ::: Ad Nauseam

In the summer of 1996, when Levi Strauss chose Toronto to test-market its new SilverTab jeans line, Chesney put on his most daring show yet: he called it “The Queen Street Takeover.” For one year, as the centrepiece of the most expensive outdoor ad campaign in Canadian history, Chesney painted his beloved strip silver. He bought up the facades of almost every building on the busiest stretch of Queen and turned them into Levi’s billboards, upping the ante of the ad extravaganza even further with 3-D extensions, mirrors and neon. It was Murad’s greatest triumph, but the takeover presented some problems for Michael Chesney. When I spent a day with him at the tail end of the SilverTab bonanza, he could barely walk down Queen Street without running into somebody who was furious about the invasion. After ducking a few bullets, he told me a story of bumping into an acquaintance: “she said, ‘You took over Queen Street.’ She was really almost crying and I just, my heart sank, and she was really bummed out. But, hey, what can you do? It’s the future, it’s not Queen anymore.”

Naomi Klein, No Logo

We don’t normally go after first party signage but just as City Council was adopting the Queen Street West Heritage Conservation District H&M bought space on three illegal billboards in the Conservation District area announcing the opening of their new Queen West store. H&M then covered the entire facade of their new store in illegal signage:

The signs by-law prohibits first party signs that face a street from being larger than 30% of the building face of the storey upon which they are erected and such signs may not be erected higher than the second storey.

In addition, H&M is currently renting illegal fascia signs on these three Conservation District locations: 312 Queen West (Megaposter, recent re-erection); 269 Queen West (CBS); 194 Queen West (Megaposter) all of which are former Chesney sites. H&M has also purchased transit shelter wraps on CBS’s Queen Street shelters.

H&M buys space on illegal billboards globally. H&M famously bought a building wrap on the Flatiron building in New York. All the more reason to give this pathetic company the boot off Queen. Otherwise, it’s not Queen anymore, is it?

Read Torontoist’s Bah H&Mbug

A fantastic new blog, My Bike Lane, with a searchable Google Map, has launched to track illegally parked cars in bike lanes. Be sure to check it out. You can photograph illegally parked cars and submit them to the site which will track their plates.