Times Square (The Atlantic’s CityLab)
Leave it to Kristen Richards and ArchNewsNow.com to post an article relevent to my own personal agenda – in this case, my trip down to New York City on Amtrak, starting in two hours and 26 minutes. That’s when our train leaves Amtrak’s station in Providence. We will be staying at a Hilton just feet to the left of the edge of the picture above.
Read Laura Bliss’s “No, the Feds Are Not Requiring Times Square to Remove Its Billboards” in The Atlantic’s CityLab.
The story posted on ANN describes how new federal transportation legislation puts the famous billboards of Times Square at risk. Not in time to cleanse the view from our hotel, I’m happy to say. Apparently, New York is the only state that has challenged the new law, which designates hundreds of thousands of miles of arterial road (such as Broadway as it plows through Times Square) as federal highway, subject to existing federal law on how many billboards are permitted and how proximate they can be to these highways – with punishments in the amount of 10 percent of whatever federal funds accrue to such highways.
Hey! I’m starting to sound like a federalista myself!
Anyway, it is clear that places whose billboards are a kind of cultural landmark will be able to exempt themselves from the regulations. Typical! Take all those billboards off the buildings of Times Square and what will you have? How can anyone really know? All those buildings have been covered with ads for so long that who knows what horrors (or otherwise) might be underneath.
Warning: Post no bills to this blog these next few days expected. How’s that for federalese?
Architecture Here and There 