Sidewalk Sale
It was the Summer of Toilets. Not since the advent of the modern suction-flush had bathrooms received as much attention as they did in July and August of 2003. It was then that Mayor Mike hammered out terms with City Council on the plan that had eluded so many of his predecessors: 20 self-cleaning public toilets would be installed throughout Manhattan, maintained and operated by a private contractor to be determined.
Assuming reporters still use the inverted pyramid method of writing (putting the important information up top), the decision to lead with the toilets was a curious one. Curious because these articles all went on to explain that the toilets were just a very small part of something much bigger called the Street Furniture Initiative, which Bloomberg would sign that October.
As the press has since come to realize, the Street Furniture Initiative (SFI) is not aimed at alleviating the burden on Starbucks restrooms in Midtown. Nor is it a public health response to the presence of urine in the streets. It is a sweeping plan to refashion every freestanding structure on New York City's sidewalks according to a standardized, corporate model. It calls for the erection of 3,300 new bubble-top bus stops, as well as hundreds of slimmer, ultramodern newsstands, info kiosks and multi-rack newspaper boxes. (And 20 toilets, mostly around major transit hubs.) In the mayor's words, SFI will "dramatically alter the city's streetscape?[and] transform the look and feel of its streets."
It all sounds very nice. But there's a catch.
A private contractor will build and maintain the new structures, which will be smothered in advertising. Every piece of furniture will be designed and positioned for the purpose of transmitting as many ad messages to as many people as possible. Some of the revenue generated will go to the maintenance of the furniture; most of it will leave the city as private profit. The contract is worth an estimated $1 billion over 20 years to the winning company; the city estimates its cut will be around $400 million.
"In challenging fiscal times like these," explained Bloomberg after signing SFI in 2003, "a coordinated street furniture program offers the City the unique opportunity to?creat[e] a vibrant and aesthetically pleasing streetscape?without the burden of public investment."
This statement remains disingenuous on a couple of levels. Nobody ever said New York's streets weren't already vibrant, and Bloomberg knows full well that SFI predates "challenging fiscal times like these." In fact, it is an old idea that has been gaining steam in the U.S. for years, a creature of the privatization mania of the 1990s more than a response to the city's current budget deficit.
The Dept. of Transportation began courting proposals from hopeful street furniture firms in March of last year. Clear Channel, with a big foot already in New York's outdoor advertising market, is considered the frontrunner to win the contract, followed by JCDecaux, a Paris-based, scandal-dogged street furniture pioneer that has decided to support France's Olympic bid by donating $50,000 to Daniel Doctoroff's NYC2012 fund. Viacom is also in the running.
No winner has yet been announced because Bloomberg's idea of a "vibrant and aesthetically pleasing streetscape" has been tied up in court since July, when the New York City Newsstand Association challenged the city over Local Law 64, an SFI-related bill that allowed the city to demolish 290 privately owned newsstands. Since issuing the SFI contract requires a clean sidewalk slate, and since current law forbade the city from wresting ownership of newsstands from its current owners, the law was amended. The newsstand owners fought back and have succeeded in delaying the city from issuing SFI a contract until June 15. City Council has agreed to revisit the fate of the newsstands during its April 4 session.
"What's at stake is the livelihood of dozens of newsstand operators and a variety of constitutional issues," says Robert S. Bookman, private counsel to the Association. "This is an unconstitutional taking of private property. We have plaintiffs that just built a new newsstand for $25,000. The City has offered nothing in return."
"The physical stands are worth a lot," explains Andrew Celli, who is representing the Association in court. "They cost between $20,000 and $30,000 to build. The city wants to bulldoze them and bring in Mega Corp. stands. Then the city will say, 'You're allowed to work in these as a serf, but you don't own the stand anymore. You can't sell it or transfer it to your children.' The equity that people invested in is worth something."
If the Newsstand Association wins, it won't be the first time. Giuliani tried to ram a similar plan through in 1998. His push to knock down existing newsstands and strip operators of their licenses was characteristically crude and ruled unconstitutional. Under the slightly revised Bloomberg plan, operators would retain their licenses and be allowed to continue working in the new stands, but the underlying business model is the same. Operators would still lack ownership rights and share none of the ad revenue brought in by the gleaming new billboard-stands. Call it Giuliani-lite.
As goes the newsstands, so may go other voices on the city's sidewalks. What the Mayor has derided as a "hodgepodge of unattractive things" that must make way for corporate street furniture is in fact just the messy face of the First Amendment in an urban setting. This includes independent newspaper boxes and street vendors, both protected by the Constitution and under threat from SFI's privatization of public space.
"This [new] street furniture will be covered with advertising, eventually most of it digital, and will be permanently located in the very spots where artists, disabled veterans and other vendors now temporarily set up displays to sell their wares," says Robert Lederman, whose vending-rights organization A.R.T.I.S.T. opposes the street furniture plan.
"The depiction of these sidewalk billboards as public amenities is knowing subterfuge," contends Lederman. "Since these ads will all be located according to permit and contract, the police will arrest any vendor or speaker who sets up in front of them. This is why the city is trying to limit the number of vendors and require permits of First Amendment protected vendors-it sets a precedent. Once this space is leased out, the people of NYC will never again reclaim it for their use as guaranteed by the Constitution."
Alongside newsstands and vendors, independent newspaper boxes are another canary in the corporate coalmine. The city in 2003 instituted strict new regulations for the maintenance of distribution boxes and began issuing fines for minor violations. The new rules can be sensibly interpreted as a sign that newspaper boxes are a target-part of the "unattractive hodgepodge" that has no place in 21st-century New York.
"I've been telling the dailies for years to take the newsstand case seriously," says Newsstand Association lawyer Andrew Celli. "If we go, they're next."
Whatever the fate of New York's independent newsstands, vendors and newspaper boxes, the trend of selling every surface on which eye-level advertising can be placed is accelerating daily, in the cracks, all around us. The global outdoor ad market, roughly five percent of all ad spending, is valued at $15 billion and growing. With or without newsstands as part of the package, the crown jewel of New York's own street furniture contract-its 3,300 bus stops-will soon be auctioned off and cause that number to spike.
Underground, the MTA has been busy selling off what the ad industry calls "captive audiences." The Authority has handed over underground subway walls to Clear Channel and installed LED screens at subway entrances. It is now considering installing flat-screen televisions on platforms and flipbook sequence ad panels on the walls of the subway tunnels themselves. As MTA Executive Director Katherine Lapp told the Post in 2003, "We would like to do anything that helps close our budget." (Emphasis added.)
It isn't just straphangers' eyeballs being priced. On the way to school, kids today pass ads on city busses, bus stops and lampposts. Between classes, they shuffle past Snapple billboards disguised as juice machines. Should they have a Snapple-induced seizure, they may be rushed to one of the 20 public hospitals in which the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation has placed thousands of advertisements, including on clocks and garbage cans. Speaking of garbage cans, it already seems quaint that anybody ever opposed the 2003 introduction of trashcan advertising along Broadway and Seventh Ave. in Times Square.
Michael Bloomberg is the right mayor to oversee the Times Square-ification of the city. A businessman-robot who made his fortune in part by stamping his own name onto anything that would fit the nine letters, he is unable to compute that anyone could have a problem with standardizing, branding and selling everything that can be standardized, branded and sold. It is simply inconceivable to him that advertising could be a form of pollution. In his view, as with so many of his peers in city governments across the country, advertising is a revenue-generating public good to be embraced at every opportunity. The result is coming soon to a sidewalk near you.