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Editor's note

Just over a year ago, I was struck dumb on my way to work by a 900-foot tall Kate Moss. Over six stories high, she covered the building north of Houston, windows and all. The ad, for Calvin Klein jeans, was yet another miracle of technology. Thanks to a new digital process that prints images on vinyl mesh, supersized whiskey bottles and scantily clad sicklies have been cropping up all over Manhattan. (And Los Angeles. And San Francisco. And just about every other place with tall buildings.)

Although I immediately began plotting to deface the Moss ad, the promising ideas added up to zero. The intersection is crawling with police cars; the Calvin Klein wall is un-scaleable and un-wheatpastable; and the splat of a paintball gun would scarely cover a fingernail. Complaining to the community boards or city council didn’t help much–they didn’t like the billboards, either. The only response that seemed to make any sense at all was muttering profanities to myself, which, although empty and pathetic, somehow felt appropriate. The sheer massiveness of these advertisements seems to render all resistance moot. We are, in their presence, tiny little people.

In August 1999, Rachel Neumann, Vickie Larson, Jeff Hyslop, and I started a tiny little project. We enlisted about 35 friends to scout out Manhattan’s major thru-ways, taking notes on the outdoor advertising. The result was a tourist map of Manhattan (enclosed in this issue) . . . not your standard Big Apple guide, though: the only sites on it are outdoor ads. On Memorial Day weekend, a bunch of us spent Saturday meeting and greeting tourists in Times Square; we handed out free maps and answered questions about the city. Although this had the unintentional side effect of antagonizing a few tourists ("What, you call THIS a map?!" "Where’s the Disney store?"), we had a great time and no one got arrested or shot.

Our website documents all this for the digitally equipped: www.stayfreemagazine.org/admap. There’s a discussion area as well. Ultimately, we hope this effort will help people organize against ad creep in their own areas, so feel free to contact us or any of the groups listed inside the map. That’s it. Thanks.

Carrie McLaren
July 2000