­Graffiti group takes on ads

Artists take back ‘public’ spaces filled with advertising

 On a night not long ago, while the city either partied or slept, a band of some 80 artists and concerned citizens fanned across downtown Manhattan to take back swaths of “public” space that had become inundated with advertising.

According to Jordan Seiler, who manages a blog devoted to the issue, the group whitewashed about 120 billboards from Chelsea to the Lower East Side.

Once the ads were painted over, they turned them into canvasses for graffiti or papered them with a letter that purported to be from the city Department of Building’s nonexistent “Municipal Landscape Control Committee.” The letters declared the billboards illegal.

“The Municipal Landscape Control Committee has organized the whitewashing of all NPA City Outdoor street-level advertising locations until further structural removal can be implemented,” it reads.
The ads were maintained by one company, NPA City Outdoor. “NPA was targeted because its advertising is unpermitted by the city,” Seiler said.

Calls to NPA and the Buildings Dept. for comment were not returned.

According to Steven Lambert, senior fellow for art and technology at the Eyebeam Center, a lot of the advertising in New York City was either put up without a permit or is located in places not zoned for it.  

The Sign Enforcement Unit of the city’s Department of Buildings polices such ads and, when appropriate, hands out fines, but, Lambert says, “The DOB has their hands full making sure cranes don’t crash. They simply don’t have the ability to enforce the code.”