Monday, September 17th, 2007 ::: USA

Advertising is now overwhelming the fundamental character of the some of the greatest neighbourhoods of America. It’s time for all of us to open our eyes and see what’s happening to our hometowns. We need to start an urgent national conversation about the character of our highways, our streets, our neighbourhoods before that insatiable vinyl monster eats us alive.

-Scenic America

IllegalSigns.ca was in San Francisco last week where the state of affairs is grim. This is our report.

You can tell that you have entered San Francisco by looking at the billboards. Unlike any of the neighboring municipalities, San Francisco requires billboards to have permit plates and size plates. Here is a 12′X25′ Clear Channel sign presumably operating under permit #443332:

The 12′X25′ is America’s version of the 10′X20’s that dominate Toronto. Everything is bigger in America. Bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger hamburgers, bigger boobs, and bigger billboards.

These illegal “re-plastered posters” have recently proliferated in San Fran. None of them have permits according to this article, this article and this article in BeyondChron.

We have the same type of posterboards here. Every one of them in Toronto is also illegal - we just haven’t gotten around to complaining about them yet.

While San Francisco voters approved a ban on new billboards a few years ago, the municipal government recently implemented a Street Furniture program. In Los Angeles, their Street Furniture program opened the door to spurious lawsuits in which Metro Lights Outdoor Media claimed to have First Amendment rights to erect billboards without permits. How can the City demonstrably justify restricting the exact same signs on private property that it is erecting on immediately adjacent public land, land that is actually closer to the roadway and has a greater impact on the streetscape?

As a result, illegal transit shelter-style backlit signs erected on private property immediatly adjacent to the road allowance are proliferating across Los Angeles and San Francisco. According to San Francisco Beautiful they are supposed to get fines of $2500/day, but it’s not happening. Here are five such unpermitted locations in San Fran operated by Metro Lights Outdoor Media, a subsidiary of Fuel Outdoor which operates illegal signs America-wide:

Our City Solicitor has brought Toronto into legal jeopardy. If she could think strategically, she’d have at least the foggiest idea and expect a similar court challenge in Toronto.

Speaking of Street Furniture, JC Decaux rolled out co-ordinated newspaper boxes in San Francisco. Take a look:

The San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today found that their papers didn’t sell in JC Decaux’s boxes, so they don’t participate in the program and they install their own boxes beside the “co-ordinated” boxes. After all, if you want to sell newspapers, you should be advertising newspapers, not “Smirnoff Blueberry + White Cranberry + Tonic.” SF’s Street Furniture program includes these three sided billboards that have zero pretense to public amenity and monster info pillars like this one which dominates the United Nations Monument. The pillars have PSAs on the panel not visible to traffic.

Aside from the ubiquitous 12′X25’s, San Francisco has plenty of 14′X48’s like this Clear Channel 14′X48′ which is obstructing the first party mural of the historic Buzzell Building:

Every blank wall in San Francisco either has a vinyl fascia sign or has been staked out by an advertising company like these two walls for which Adco Outdoor (aka Orion Outdoor Media) has staked a claim without a permit plate:

Unlike in Toronto, vinyl wall signs in San Fran are typically printed on a very thin piece of vinyl and affixed to the wall with adhesive, like these two Next Media signs, which dubiously purport to have permits:

From a distance, these two signs look like they are painted on. Vinyl signs in Toronto are printed on heavy vinyl (like the orange first party sign in the photo above). The only sign in Toronto using this lighter and apparently cheaper format is Titan Outdoor’s illegal fascia sign at 878 Yonge Street, where we caught them in the act of affixing the sign. Perhaps the climate up here has something to do with it, although 878 Yonge doesn’t seem to fall down in the winter.

Plenty of wall signs in San Fran don’t have permit numbers, size plates or nameplates, like this one:

Some have nameplates and size plates but no permit plates like this CBS sign.

This sign, operated by Advertising Display Systems (the Strategic Media of San Francisco) has no permit plate, only a company-specific identification number:

Meanwhile, we saw a suspicious number of Clear Channel 12′X25’s showing PSAs which were obstructed by trees:

Taxi cabs in San Francisco tend to have roof billboards. Some have vinyl wraps and roof billboards:

Taxi wraps and roof signs are legal in Toronto - they were tested but never took off. We didn’t see any video billboards in San Francisco; nor did we see any tri-vision signs, except at AT&T Park, where we saw the Diamondbacks crush the Giants in-between commercials.