Pier Three, Phila.
Too big to easily demolish and too old to cheaply renovate, the Tidewater Grain
Co. elevator has one last asset: high concrete walls that greet every visitor
who enters the city from the south. Forty years after the last bushel of grain
left its walls, the Tidewater may soon announce Philadelphia's national
preeminence in new industry—billboards.
The building's owner, Preston Ship & Rail, wants to crown the Tidewater's
mammoth concrete grain silos with five illuminated “wall wrap” billboards, a
total of 38,786 square feet of advertising, according to the company's zoning
application. That's four times the size of the largest billboard in Times
Square, and more than half the size of a football field. Taken alone, the 14,446
square foot sign proposed for the Tidewater's southern face would be the largest
billboard in the United States. Added together, the Tidewater's five signs would
be larger than the largest billboard in the world, a 34,080 square foot sign in
Britain.
The billboards would also be several times the maximum size permitted by a 1991
city law. Sponsored by City Councilman David Cohen, the law states that
billboards can be no larger than 1,500 square feet. The smallest of the
Tidewater five would be more than triple that. The law forbids more than two
billboards on one lot. Preston wants five. The law attempts to cap the total
number of billboards in the city by requiring owners to tear down one old
billboard for each new one they build. Preston can't comply, as they don't own
any other billboards. In all, the Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I)
found twenty-six reasons to refuse Preston's application for permission to
construct the billboards.
Preston has argued that the billboards will allow them to fund improvements on
the property and bring 110 jobs to the city. Two years ago, Preston, which was
already renting a portion of Pier Three for their artificial reef-building
business, paid their landlord $545,000 for the Tidewater property, which
includes the pier and the elevator. Now they want to spend an additional $15
million to fix collapsing portions of the pier and use the billboards to raise
the money.
“Without putting lots of money into the pier, the thing will ultimately
collapse,” said John Mattioni, one of the attorneys representing Preston, in a
telephone interview. The company is currently waiting on a decision from the
Zoning Board of Adjustments (ZBA) for easements that would overrule L&I. Since
their last hearing, Preston's attorneys have sent a letter to the ZBA saying
that they would be willing to accept a five-year easement and earmark the
billboard revenues for pier repairs.
The proposed signs are designed to be visible from at least a quarter of a mile
away, from the Interstate 95's Girard Point Bridge to the east and the George C.
Platt Memorial Bridge to the west. One hundred and seventy thousand cars pass
over the bridges each day, according to the Pennsylvania Department of
Transportation.
Preston's plan has some powerful supporters. “Who is it really hurting?” asked
City Council President Anna Verna in an interview with the Daily News. Preston
Ship and Rail is being represented by Mattioni Ltd., whose website lists the
city's Register of Wills Ronald Donatucci as “counsel to the firm … Mr.
Donatucci's long government service provides insight to the firm and its clients
when dealing with governmental and bureaucratic agencies.” Donatucci is also
Democratic leader of the 26th Ward, where the Tidewater is located, was present
at the March 10 meeting before the ZBA, has received campaign contributions from
local billboard companies, and has asked Verna to oppose legislation regulating
billboards in the past, according to the Inquirer. Donatucci did not return
several messages left with assistants at his office, who said he was on
vacation. When asked to elaborate on the reasons for Verna's position, chief of
staff Bob Previdi said Verna favored the easements because of the Tidewater's
location in an industrial area, far away from any homes. “It's about where
people live. The council president feels advertising in residential areas is an
eyesore, but this is not a residential area.”
But a new study suggests that even billboards located miles away from any home
can do lasting damage to a city's image. In his book The Evaluative Image of the
City, Professor Jack Nasar of Ohio State University interviewed 400 residents
and visitors on their impressions of two Tennessee cities. Nasar, who holds a
doctorate in Man-Environment Relations from Pennsylvania State University,
discovered that the greater the number and size of signs in an urban
environment, the greater the impression of disorder and chaos. “In the research
that's been done on people's visual preferences in a city,” Nasar said in a
telephone interview. “There's a consistent preference against disorderly,
bright, large objects that intrude onto the natural environment.”
On a recent visit to Philadelphia for a conference on environmental design,
Nasar said he was impressed by the hand-painted murals he saw on the train ride
in from the airport, and said the city's image would be hurt if billboards were
the first thing to greet visitors at Philadelphia's southern gates.
“The image of your city, especially for tourists, is conveyed by the areas they
most frequently visit,” Nasar said. “Billboards take away from the impression of
order.” The amount of outdoor signage in Philadelphia has exploded over the past
decade for a few reasons. The development of wall wrap technology, which allows
billboards to be hung over and strapped to existing façades like banners, rather
than pasted onto freestanding frames, is perfectly suited to Philadelphia's
aging stock of giant industrial structures. As of mid-April, two oversized wall
wraps remain hanging in Center City, despite their questionable legality. A
6,200 square foot sign for Microsoft still hangs at Eighth and Market streets,
despite a September ruling by Commonwealth Court that the sign violated city
law. An even larger sign still hangs off the back of the Electric Factory
building at Seventh and Callowhill streets, despite a judge's order that the
building's owner remove the sign and pay $65,000 in fines.
Finally, many billboard companies have been able to skirt the law without fear
of reprisal thanks to weak enforcement measures, especially during the term of
former Mayor Edward Rendell, now Pennsylvania's governor. Rendell attempted to
reach an agreement with the owners of more than 1,000 small fifty-five square
foot signs (known as ‘eight-sheets') in Philadelphia neighborhoods: Most would
be legalized, a few would come down, and the owners would pay the city licensing
fees. Eight-sheets have been criticized by the black clergy for carrying alcohol
and tobacco advertisements in areas frequented by children.
Nine years later, most of the eight-sheets are still up and nearly 1,000 are
still unlicensed. In 1999, Rendell asked Philadelphia Industrial Development
Corporation to give Keystone Outdoor Advertising a license to build a cluster of
eight double-sided billboards on city-owned land along Interstate 95 on
Enterprise Avenue, across the river from the Tidewater. Rendell's executive
order promises that “revenue from these signs will put over $3 million in the
City coffers” in ten years. That's a small fraction of what the signs would make
for their owner, Dominic Cipollini, who has given Rendell almost $50,000 in
campaign contributions, according to the Inquirer. The ZBA overruled L&I's
finding that the plan would violate the 1991 law, but the billboards were held
up in court for years by an anti-billboard community group, the Society Created
to Reduce Urban Blight (SCRUB). Early this month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
declined to hear SCRUB's latest appeal.
Keystone's attorney, Carl Primavera, said he wasn't sure whether the Enterprise
Avenue project was still moving forward: “It was on appeal for a long time. I'll
have to talk to my client, but my suspicion is that they'll be moving forward
with it.” Should the ZBA approve the Tidewater plan, SCRUB may file suit,
according to Executive Director Mary Tracy.
“We're spending millions of dollars to get companies to stay in Philadelphia,
and at the same time, we're auctioning off our city's most important asset—our
visual landscape,” Tracy said. “This would be the first thing people see when
they arrive in Philadelphia, and the last thing they see when they leave.”
Luz Cardenas, a spokeswoman for Mayor Street, said the administration is working
on a citywide policy to address the billboard issue, particularly the illegal
eight-sheets. “The mayor has asked the managing director to get together with
the city solicitor and come up with a plan on how the city will handle outdoor
signs,” she said.