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City officials hoped their 200-foot limit on signs would cap the number of billboards because the smallest standard billboards are 288 square feet. (Existing billboards have been grand-fathered in.) "People I talk to don't like 'em and never have," former city planning director Lloyd Keefe, above, says of painted wall signs. |
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"People have busy lives," counters sign painter Mark Bennett, at right. "They don't come to City Council to say, 'I like wall advertising, it's cool art.'" |
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In an effort to limit giant ads, even non-commercial wall murals like this one on the Oregon History Center would not be allowed.The city struck an informal deal with Mark Bennett, allowing him to keep up the 21 big wall signs he painted before the strict size restrictions were imposed. In return, he agreed not to put up any new signs."It's liberty versus livability. That's a bad set of choices." |
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Only a city hearings officer--a quasi-judicial position created by the city charter--can levy fines against illegal signs. |
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"It's very very simple. The city is just not enforcing the regulations."
The city ordered Kirk Becker to stop work on the Widmer sign at Southwest 4th Avenue and Stark Street in early June. He didn't. "This sign is the subject of potential litigation and therefore the city has no further comment at this point," a Bureau of Buildings spokeswoman said.
Mayor Vera Katz told a group of
Architect Alex Pierce made formal complaints in July about three illegal signs. He never got a response from the city.
Mural watchers claim that the River City Bicycle sign contains a hidden message--a Bank |
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"Having this large commercial sign dominate the view takes away from all the other pleasing architectural features," says the City Club's Paul Leistner. |
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Knowles likens the sign debate to newspaper boxes on the street. "It's free speech bumping up against aesthetics --papers get free advertising in the right-of-way. Isn't that a conflict between what we desire and what's constitutional?"
The city went to court in 1976 to defend its billboard code against Ackerley Communications, owner of the Seattle Supersonics and one of the five largest billboard companies in America. The battle lasted nine years before Ackerley prevailed in the Oregon Court of Appeals.
In addition to crass commercial messages, artistic murals such as this depiction of Old Glory on East Burnside Street might be banned under a revamped city sign policy. |
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Kirk Becker touts his Portland sign-painting business as "The Company With Big Walls." The double entendre is no mistake. Two weeks ago, Becker painted a massive Miller Genuine Draft beer sign on the side of a Northeast Portland building, right on Broadway near Memorial Coliseum. He did it in broad daylight, even though he didn't have the required permit and the sign clearly violated city code. Under city regulations, Becker should be paying fines of $1,000 a day. Instead, like the two curvy girls on his beer sign, he's smirking. He recently put up two other illegal wall signs--including a Widmer ad at Southwest 4th Avenue and Stark Street that could be dubbed "Attack of the 50-foot Hefeweizen"--and he's planning to paint eight more. Critics like former city planning director Lloyd Keefe think Becker and other outlaw sign painters are uglifying Portland's urban environment. "Do you want to be constantly bombarded by advertising, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? Do you want to live in a dump or a park?" says Keefe, noting that cities from Beaverton to Jacksonville, Fla., have prohibited the commodification of their buildings' walls. Some say Keefe's an extremist. A city is not a park. It's a place of commerce, and tall schooners of beer are hardly the most offensive images you'll encounter in a modern metropolis. Still, there's no denying that Becker is thumbing his nose--or maybe waving some other defiant digit--at the city's rules. So what gives? Why haven't city officials, who love to boast about Portland's urban design, cracked down on the giant ads? In part, city regulators have been distracted with other tasks, such as keeping tabs on booming construction. But it's also because citizens, for the most part, seem indifferent to the sign blitz. There's another, more important, reason. The Oregon Constitution puts the city in a quandary. The constitution grants extraordinary protections to free speech--so much so that it doesn't allow cities to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial messages. That makes Portland's regulations--which differentiate between ads and art--all but indefensible in court. So the city faces the decision of either allowing unlimited ads or--in a strange legal twist--restricting public art created by the likes of students at Jefferson High and famous muralists commissioned by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. "It's liberty versus livability," says City Commissioner Charlie Hales, who oversees the city's building and sign regulations. "That's a bad set of choices." Which explains the bravado behind Kirk Becker's big walls. Becker is not the only one painting illegal wall signs. Check out the River City Bicycle sign on the corner of Southwest 4th and Washington; or head up West Burnside Street and you'll see more outlaw signs, including paintings on the Blitz-Weinhard brewery headquarters. Both went up in the last six months and signal a new era in Portland's wall-sign industry. For years, Mark Bennett's company, O.B. Walls, was the only outfit in town that painted wall signs. Bennett got into the business back in 1989, when city regulations were more liberal. His best-known works were his 40-foot-tall depictions of Trail Blazers Jerome Kersey, Terry Porter and Rod Strickland on a building at the west end of the Morrison Bridge, and his Blockbuster Video ads--which used to change copy every two months--at Northwest 15th Avenue and Burnside. Since then, Bennett has literally painted the town all over the country. His works include a 17-story painting of football star Barry Sanders in Detroit (for Nike) and a 120-foot-tall Demi Moore head (as G.I. Jane) in Los Angeles. At one point, Bennett had 21 large wall signs in Portland. Today, there's no telling how many total signs exist in the city. Portland officials don't maintain an inventory of wall signs. Sign painters claim that critics shouldn't fear an epidemic of wall signs. Only so many walls are big enough, available, and in the high-traffic areas that advertisers desire. "It's silly to say every wall will be painted," says Bennett. "It's never done on a wall that has a lot of aesthetic or architectural appeal." Clearly, though, Portland has more walls to paint. Becker says he got into the business because he saw "a market that hadn't been tapped that much." Becker claims two California firms see Portland the same way and "are moving up here" to dip their brushes into the market. Another local industry giant is also poised to swing into action. AK Media (formerly known as Ackerley Outdoor Advertising) is "the largest operator of outdoor advertising in the Pacific Northwest, Massachusetts and South Florida," according to its sales brochures, with more than 9,500 signs. AK Media owns and operates 98 percent of the billboards in Portland. There's a reason behind AK Media's move into wall signs. Last September, the City Council revised its code to severely restrict billboards. And every regulation has an equal and opposite market reaction, says Len Bergstein, a political consultant and troubleshooter for AK Media. In this case, Bergstein says, the result was a predictable "proliferation of wall signs." "Quite frankly," he adds, "we told the city last year that's what would happen." Earlier this year AK Media decided to showcase its ability to do wall signs, and painted two large ones--a Mercedes ad at the west end of the Morrison Bridge, and the River City Bicycle ad at Southwest 4th Avenue and Washington Street. It's understandable--it's a lucrative business. Although Becker, Bennett and AK Media all refused to divulge their price lists, wall signs are reported to rent for as much as $7,000 a month. And they're worth every penny, according to AK Media sales brochure. "There are no knobs to turn on or off, no stations to tune into, no newspaper to buy. Outdoor [advertising] is simply there, physically in front of your audience. That means consumers are continuously exposed to your message.... Its physical size alone demands the attention of consumers." Without a trace of irony, AK Media stresses that outdoor advertising works particularly well in Portland, which has "experienced tremendous population and business growth while preserving a wonderful quality of life in a spectacular natural environment." These "wonderful qualities" seem threatened, though, when the city allows sign scofflaws to break the rules. The regulations that govern wall signs are as clear as the four-story glass of Widmer beer at 4th and Stark, says Keefe, who was the city's top planner from 1951 to 1973. The city limits wall signs--just like billboards--to a maximum of 200 square feet. That's about the size of the side of a UPS truck. Yet most Portland wall signs are about 800 square feet; some, like the River City Bicycle signs, are three to four times larger. "It's very very simple," Keefe lectures, explaining the proliferation of illegal wall signs. "The city is just not enforcing the regulations." In part, the city hasn't been policing wall signs because it's got bigger problems on its hands, such as planning for 50,000 new housing units in the next 20 years. "They have 101 things to do," says Bergstein. "This is not exactly the biggest thing on their plate." City planning director David Knowles agrees. "In the scheme of city development, it's not a huge issue," says Knowles, who plays a key role in writing the city regulations. At the same time, however, the city has created a Graffiti Task Force, and young graffiti artists are handcuffed, booked and fingerprinted for their lawless displays--why not Becker? Curiously, the surge of new wall signs has not drawn much criticism in Portland, a city that's fought a running battle with the billboard industry over the last 40 years. A couple of watchdogs, like Keefe and architect Alex Pierce, complain. But many Portlanders are clearly more agitated by infill development on their streets than brazen commercialism downtown. Besides, protesting against wall signs today seems as passé as the old song about signs, signs "clogging up the scenery and breaking my mind." That's puzzling, says Paul Leistner, research director and resident expert on signs at the nonprofit City Club, because the sign issue becomes more important as the population swells in Portland. "As the city becomes more dense," Leistner says, "the look and the feel of buildings becomes so much more important to livability." Pierce knows how it looks and feels to him. "The city is being uglified daily," he says. Pierce filed formal complaints about the new illegal signs in July. A month later, the city hadn't responded, and Pierce claimed that the "sign industry is well aware that Portland's sign administration is a 'paper tiger.'" City planner Knowles also acknowledges that there's another reason the city wasn't too eager to enforce its rules. The rules, Knowles concedes, are probably unconstitutional. At the heart of the city's lax enforcement is this dilemma: The city has two sets of regulations--one for painted wall signs, or advertisements, and another for "wall decorations," or non-commercial murals. According to city code, wall decorations are "designed and intended as a decorative or ornamental feature" and "do not contain text, numbers, registered trademarks, or registered logos." Examples include the mural of Packy the elephant at the west end of the Burnside Bridge and the trompe l'oeil painted by internationally renowned muralist Richard Haas on the back of the Oregon Historical Society building. There's a nice enough idea behind the code. The city didn't want to hinder nonprofit groups from decorating walls, says Knowles. Painting murals brings neighbors together, gives students a vehicle for expression and adds aesthetic flourish to the landscape. But this well-meaning code clashes with the Oregon Constitution, which protects both commercial and non-commercial messages as forms of free speech. "Experts would tell you that the Oregon Constitution is unique in that it does not allow us to regulate based on content," Knowles explains. City Attorney Jeff Rogers agrees. Although Rogers won't go so far as to pronounce the city's rules indefensible in court, he doesn't disagree that the city faces long odds. Becker maintains that the city's rules are unjust. "I don't think a neighborhood association should have any more rights than a corporation," he says. "Do you?" So if the city is pushed, it must come up with one set of rules for both painted wall signs--such as Becker's smirking Miller Genuine Draft ad--and non-commercial murals, such as the Brooklyn Neighborhood Association mural on Southeast Milwaukie Avenue. That means allowing everything--in the form of huge ads and murals. Or allowing nothing, by severely restricting the size of both, which is what cities such as Beaverton and Gresham have done. "The tradeoff is either we open the gates and have gigantic billboards on walls or lose the art we all love," says Leistner of the City Club. City officials hoped the sign industry wouldn't exploit the legal loophole. Knowles admits this strategy was "optimistic," considering the money at stake. Now Becker and his ilk are making the city look naive. "Because we have someone thumbing his nose at the law, because people are putting up signs without permits, we don't really have any choice now," Knowles concedes. "We need to eliminate the distinction between signs and murals and go ahead with the enforcement of these violations." Pierce says the city's course is clear. "Restrict murals," he says, "if it comes to that." Hales agrees. "If the two choices really are to regulate artistic expression or let 'em paint the town, I would reluctantly choose to regulate artistic expression," he says. "That's one of the big policy challenges in Oregon," adds Leistner. "With our added free-speech rights come added burdens." Knowles told WW he will recommend to the Planning Commission next month that murals come under the same restrictions as wall signs--which means they can be no larger than 200 square feet. Allowing time for public hearings, that means the City Council could change the rules as early as Oct. 29. Surprisingly, arts advocates including Mike Lindberg, Eloise MacMurray and Kristy Edmunds think the city is headed toward a bad decision. Becker claims that Portlanders love his paintings of wheat beer and giggling girls in tight sweaters. "You should've seen the reaction from people while we were working on the last one," he says. "Everyday, people would give us a 'thumbs-up' sign and tell us it was fantastic." Lindberg, a former city commissioner and now president of the Oregon Symphony Foundation, won't go that far. But he does say most signs are "not disturbing or glaringly ugly" and even add "juice and life" to the cityscape. It's particularly tempting to see wall signs that way when restricting them will, in effect, ban art murals. Eloise MacMurray is public art director for the Regional Arts and Culture Council. MacMurray isn't up on the intricacies of the brewing debate, but she knows enough to say she's not in favor of banning murals. "If there's no other option," she says, "I guess I'd be in favor of maintaining murals"--which means allowing unlimited wall signs. Her view is shared by Kristy Edmunds, executive director and curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Edmunds is planning to bring acclaimed San Francisco muralist Rigo to Portland in the spring to paint some of his politically charged messages on local walls. But under Knowles' proposal, Rigo would be a no-go. Edmunds can't go for that. "I don't like being bombarded by commercial messages," she says. "But if there has to be one standard, I would err on the side of allowing everything." She doubts it would lead to hundreds of wall signs--at the least, she says, she thinks city officials should figure out how many wall signs are likely to go up before making a decision. "Isn't it possible," she asks, "to investigate how many sites exist before creating an inflammatory pseudo-debate?" The more important issue, in Keefe's mind, is how the scenery in Portland changed so dramatically without a protest from citizens. "You've got to be blind if you can't see the signs," he says. "I think most of the people who live in Portland, invest in Portland and are mortgaged to the hilt in Portland want to live in the City of Roses and all that entails. It's strictly a matter of environment and whether you want to live in a city you're proud of." Beaverton and Jacksonville have made their decisions. It's Portland's time. "It was nice," Hales says of the city's policy, "while it lasted." |
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