And while the plan for one megascreen in Wrigley Field was the subject of hot public debate, and a rash of smaller digital screens on private property inspired the City Council to slap a nine-month moratorium on them (it’ll expire next April), the invasion of 34 of these driver distractions, marring the views of Chicago’s skyline and standing on city property, has barely caused a peep.
Except, that is, from the handful of aldermen who tried to stop it. Second Ward alderman Robert Fioretti was among them: “Our skyline is majestic, unparalleled,” Fioretti says. “Do we really want to ruin it? The advertising industry steamrolled over the city negotiators on this. They got everything they wanted.”
As they pretty much have since the first attempts to regulate billboard advertising, during the Lyndon Johnson administration.
What obesity is to Michelle Obama, billboards were to Lady Bird. They had mushroomed around the interstate highways that had begun to be built in the 1950s, blighting bucolic views, and she got LBJ to push for a law that was supposed to clear them away. That law, the Highway Beautification Act, was passed in 1965. Unfortunately, says Max Ashburn, spokesman for the D.C.-based nonprofit Scenic America, under pressure from an outdoor advertising lobby powerful then and now, the HBA has been so watered down it’s more like the Billboard Protection Act.