Los Angeles City Council placed a three-month ban on new billboards Wednesday as the council seeks to review and revamp the city's policy on billboards, signs and electronic message boards, according to media reports...
Billboard baloney: L.A. council's `ban' poised to fail
Angelenos hate billboards, and with good reason. These massive monuments to blight are everywhere, exacerbating traffic congestion and uglifying our dear city.
That's been bad enough, but in recent months the city has been beset by billboards of a new and terrifying breed: flashing digital billboards and supersize "supergraphic" ads on the sides of buildings. It's no surprise that Angelenos are outraged.
LOS ANGELES — Mark Legan has enjoyed his quiet, leafy neighborhood for 12 years, until someone threw a switch and filled his nights with bright, colorful lights.
"When the sun goes down, you can't ignore it," he says, gesturing from his living room toward the giant television billboard that recently went up a half block away on Santa Monica Boulevard...
"I got a call this morning from one of my spies," Dennis Hathaway was telling me Monday at his dining room table in Venice. "Looks like there's a digital conversion up near the airport."
Hathaway has eyeballs all over Los Angeles, an army of ticked off citizens doing a job city officials have failed to do. When members of his volunteer crew spot standard billboards going digital, or signs that look out of compliance with city code, they call Hathaway to report them....
Silver Lake resident Ric Montejano was walking Sparky, his Chihuahua-mix, when he came upon something that cut him to his "very soul.” Two blocks from his place, on the corner of Silver Lake Boulevard and Effie Street, near a sleek little Italian café and a pricey wine shop, a massive, blazing digital billboard flashed huge images of Sean Combs in his skivvies, a grinning Ellen DeGeneres and a KNBC promo. “I immediately started yelling,” says Montejano, who’s lived in the area since 1972. “Six months down the line there will be three. Then six. There will be no stopping it.”
