Is This Times Square’s Biggest Billboard Ever?

Coming soon to the Conde Nast Building.

Coming soon to the top of the  Conde Nast Building.

At last count, Times Square had 230 illuminated advertising billboards blazing away day and night.

So why is the proposed sign for Swedish retailer H & M, set to crown the Conde Nast Building at 4 Times Square by the end of the year, causing such a fuss?

For starters, it’s super big. With four 70-foot panels, H & M will dwarf rooftop behemoths like the GE sign that crowns 30 Rockefeller Plaza and the Met Life moniker looming over Park Avenue near Grand Central Station.

It’s also expensive. The Durst Organization, which owns the building, has tried in vain to lease the airspace since the tower went up in 2000. H & M snapped it up in part to tout their new flagship store at Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, which at 57,000 square feet is also pretty big.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” community activist Marisa Redanty, who lives down the street from the building, told The Wall Street Journal upon seeing the plans. “It’s very un-classy — it’s tacky, and it’s like ‘Are we going to look like Tokyo?’”

But this is Times Square we’re talking about. Taxi Driver was set here in the 70s. Creepy people dressed up like Mickey Mouse and Cookie Monster hang out here today, hugging tourists.

As for the flashing uber-ads, Times Square already looks like Tokyo — deliberately. It’s been building toward this moment for more than a century.

Time Square’s first illuminated billboard clicked on in 1904 on the side of a bank on Broadway and 46th Street. “As theaters popped up, people started coming to the area,” says Steven Heller, co-author of “Times Square Style: Graphics from the Great White Way.” “Advertising technology improved with the beginning of illumination, and Times Square became a good place to advertise.”

The area was a promotional hub by the 1920s, “and that’s never really changed,” Heller says.

The neon billboards that resulted were known as “spectaculars,” a pitch-perfect term coined

The legendary Camel ad.

The legendary Camel ad.

by Douglas Leigh, creator of the legendary Camel cigarette sign that blew smoke rings. The best were minor works of commercial art, like the steaming cup of A. & P. coffee and the Super-Suds Detergent sign with 3,000 “floating” soap bubbles per minute, also Leigh creations.

These days LEDs  power most signs, notably Panasonic’s “Crossroads of the World” screen, three stories high at the center of 1 Times Square, where the New Year’s Eve ball drops. With 1.5 million LEDs, it can beam more than one billion shades of color.

Under current zoning regulations, Times Square buildings are actually required to display illuminated advertisements. The result? Billboards light up 385,000 square feet in the area, generating $60 million annually in advertising revenue (small wonder: they’re seen by 300,000 to 500,000 people a day). For anyone besotted by Times Square’s canyon of lights, a spot on the TKTS discount ticket booth’s lipstick red bleacher offers the best seat in the house.

Given its prime real estate, the new billboard’s biggest crime is that it’s boring, more corporate than clever (too bad Leigh isn’t around to work his magic on it). Why can’t we get something that at least attempts to be entertaining? Maybe the solution is skywriter humor, as suggested by Vanity Fair ; those grand-scale initials could be tweaked by adding strategically placed letters to read Hi Mom and CasH 4 Gold, albeit elusively.

Or maybe we just have to wait for Midnight Moment each night at the stroke of 12 a.m., when every billboard in Times Square displays a synchronized work of art. It only lasts three minutes, but H & M could be a terrific addition to the landscape, at least for the blink of an eye.

 

 

26 replies
  1. Guy
    Guy says:

    Thanks for the fact-filled Times Square and commercial history. Douglas Leigh really seems to have been the peak of signage artistry and engineering.

    Reply
    • Terry Trucco
      Terry Trucco says:

      You have to do a modified backbend to see the top of the Conde Nast Building. Still, I think the sign will come in bright and clear for a lot of people on airplanes — or gazing over from the Empire State Building. Thanks, Wandering Eds.

      Reply
  2. Jennifer
    Jennifer says:

    I really enjoy the research you put into getting the history of ads in Times Square right on this post. I love that. I also have to say that I like Times Square a lot more now that it’s pedestrian-friendly. When I lived in NYC I would avoid TS like the plague; ow, I take my kids there to hang out. It’s a different experience. All the ads, well…it was already well on its way to being like Bladerunner for years. Is the fuss that H&M is a downmarket shop?

    Reply
    • Terry Trucco
      Terry Trucco says:

      Times Square is in the process of getting even more pedestrian friendly. That entire area on Broadway, closed to cars in recent years, is being refurbished for pedestrians. Can’t wait to see what they come up with. Vis a vis H & M, I haven’t heard any complaints about the topic of the signs, just their size. Thanks, Jennifer.

      Reply
  3. Marina K. Villatoro
    Marina K. Villatoro says:

    Just when you think it can’t get bigger it does.

    We were just in Times square, I returned there for the first time in 6 years and It’s so different. Aside from the ads, I didn’t see this new one, or maybe didn’t even notice it among the other gazillion huge one, but what surprised me most was the new characters that are taking pictures with kids then demanding tons of money for 2 seconds of work.

    My kids loved it, but my pockets didn’t LOL

    Reply
  4. Dale
    Dale says:

    Honestly, though I love Tokyo with it’s bright signs covering almost every inch of every building in the most built up downtown areas, I really think that it can become quite messy after the initial wow factor.

    It’d be a shame to see all of the buildings in New York going the same way.

    Reply
    • Terry Trucco
      Terry Trucco says:

      I lived in Tokyo for four years, and what always struck me about the blizzard of advertising was the artificial light it threw off. The Ginza and Shinjuku were never dark — ever. It was a weird 24/7 twilight zone — with Bladerunner inflections. Thanks, Dale.

      Reply
  5. Cat of Sunshine and Siestas
    Cat of Sunshine and Siestas says:

    Dios, it’s enormous!! I was sad to see the Tio Pepe, the big-name product from wineries Gonzaliez Byass, come down from Madrid’s Plaza del Sol. It was Spain’s first bilboard, but because Vodafone paid to re-name the plaza, all other ads were taken down. A part of Spain’s economic history came down with it.

    Reply

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