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A Timeline of Manhattan Outdoors

1800s—Early 1900s
Sign painters create pictorial advertisements that everyone can understand: a bottle, an apple, a cigar. These signs advertised businesses or products sold inside the building they were painted on. Only later would the product be divorced from the location. . . . In metropolitan areas across the United States (and Britain), the proliferation of billboards and handbills leads to the formation of Temperance-like anti-billboard groups. "The bill poster is an unmitigated nuisance," huffs one writer in 1896, "and his existence ought to be forgiven him only for the occasional delight he affords the children."

1910—1921
After eleven years of lobbying, an influential conservation group, the Fifth Avenue Association, gets the city to pass a law against illuminated signs. But only on Fifth Avenue.

1920s
The craze to advertise cigarettes coincides with the invention of neon signs. Exotic names like "Egyptian Delight" hint at the secret ingredient: marijuana, not yet illegal.

1940s
The infamous Camel sign in Times Square: the first billboard to blow smoke rings! With a war on, the idea of wasting electricity on a illuminated sign seems unpatriotic. But there is no rationing when it comes to smoke (or, rather, steam).

1968
Great Britain regulates billboards in public spaces, standardizing size and presentation. Considerably smaller than New York billboards, they are deemed equally effective, thanks to eye-level placement.

1986
The Municipal Art Society pushes for a zoning ordinance that actually encourages bright, big illuminated signs–but only in Times Square. Signs proliferate in Times Square, from under 24 in the early 1980s to about 60 in 1995, covering thousands of square feet and costing as much as $1.2 million per year to lease.

1980s
AIDS transforms advertising, however briefly, into propaganda for the people, as artists–many with day jobs in the ad biz–make political ads. "Welcome to America," says one Times Square billboard, "the only industrialized country in the world beside South Africa without nationalized health care."

1990
The Reverend Calvin Butts paints the town. Shortly after the Uptown cigarette debacle–a short-lived R. J. Reynolds brand aimed directly at blacks–Butts and a group of parishioners counter cigarette marketing with civil disobedience. Walking the streets with white paint and rollers, they whitewash billboards for alcohol and tobacco in their Harlem neighborhood.

1995
The Empire State Building is lit blue for one night to "honor" the new blue M&M.

1997
The Travelers Insurance company tacks a 50-foot-by-50-foot neon umbrella–its corporate logo–atop its 39-storied building in Tribeca. Visible for miles, the umbrella’s garish glow makes its neighbors see red, literally, by shining into their apartments. Community groups in Greenwich Village and Tribeca try to have it taken down, but Travelers says the sign is immune to zoning rules. The City backs them up: it’s not an advertising sign, says the Department of Buildings, but a "symbol"–and an "integral part" of the building.

1998
Thanks to new technology that prints computer-generated images on giant rolls of vinyl, multistoried "wallscapes" start to proliferate in Manhattan. Unlike hand-painted signs, which can take months to create, wallscapes are slapped up in hours. Dot-coms soon come to dominate the landscape, with over $250 million spent on New York advertising in 1999 alone. Fast-paced, temporary, and borderless, the dot-com ads serve as a visual reminder of our eroding geographical sense of place.

1999
Public outrage over outdoor advertising grows after three women walking through Times Square are injured by fallen vinyl signs. Meanwhile, giant billboards continue to proliferate. Dockers, Reebok, Calvin Klein, and other corporations compete to take over the last vestiges of public space in lower Manhattan. A few residents fight back, shooting paint at some of the more prominent billboards; the billboards, however, are quickly replaced. The City Council vows to regulate signage; the Planning Commission declares it also has rules in the works. Over a year later, the city still waits for those rules. Says Greenwich Village community board district manager Arthur Strickler, "we’re living inside a jokebook."

SELECT SOURCES

Lockdown: America, by Christian Parenti
Signs and Wonders, by Tama Starr
The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900—1940, by Max Page
Billboard Art, by Sally Henderson and Robert Landau
The New York Times, Newsday, Associated Press, The Albany Times-Union, The Dayton Daily News