Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 ::: Before and After

We first covered this issue in Ad Nauseam: Billboards that Obscure and Crowd-Out First Party Signage.

Since then, Re/Max has successfully threatened to sue Rick Taddeo (aka the Pizza Man) for building an illegal billboard that blocked the view of the legal 401 sign advertising their office at 1855 Wilson Avenue. The threat caused Taddeo to remove his illegal billboard.

This is what the view of the Pizza Man’s sign at 175 Wendell used to look like:

Another view:

In the first photograph, the plywood sign was in fact a legal first-party sign operated by the Re/Max agency on the premises at 1885 Wilson Avenue, Toronto. In this 1999 City Council decision, a variance was granted to Re/Max to build the first-party sign.

Re/Max found that Taddeo’s illegal sign blocked the view of their sign, so they threatened to sue.  Mr. Taddeo has now removed his illegal sign face, although he has maintained the sign pole. This is what the scene looks like today:

Meanwhile, this is not the only sign that Rick Taddeo has lost.  Taddeo has not been paying some of his property owners, and they are getting antsy. The property owner at 185 Yorkland got so frustrated with Taddeo that he removed the sign himself and left it on the parking lot for Taddeo to pick up. And, of course, we have already covered the sign Taddeo lost in Mississauga. Meanwhile, although Pattison Outdoor is representing Taddeo’s signs with media buyers, they haven’t had much success selling space on the atypically constructed signs.