[photos via Stu_Jo/Curbed Photo Pool and brianvan/Curbed tipline]
While you enjoy these two newest additions to the downtown advertecture scene—at left, beer joy at the post-collapse 290 Mulberry Street, where SHoP's building that crazyass thing; at right, the bar 7B gets rebranded—the Wall Street Journal describes how outdoor advertising firms are getting around new restrictions. Getting to know Richard Schaps, the head of outdoor ad firm Van Wagner, is quite an experience:
Mr. Schaps hustled for spaces that other companies had overlooked. Federal government buildings, for example, often are exempt from many city restrictions on billboards. So Mr. Schaps now has a 60-feet-by-20-feet billboard on a post office on Ninth Avenue that rents for $20,000 a month... To help lure customers in, Mr. Schaps invites potential clients into a black Mercedes for a drive that takes in his advertising properties around Manhattan, a tour he calls “riding the boards.”Actual, unretouched final quote from Mr. Schaps: "We're almost entirely legal."
· Billboards and Loopholes [WSJ via Commercial Appeal]