This Space for Debate : Sometimes Big, Sometimes Gaudy, Always There, Are Signs ‘Litter on a Stick’ or Good for Business?

Signs, signs, everywhere are signs

Blocking up the scenery, breaking my mind.

--Five Man Electrical Band

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At Van Nuys and Ventura boulevards in Sherman Oaks, hundreds of signs shout without uttering a word, the visual equivalent of a chorus singing a Handel oratorio, a Pearl Jam diatribe and Dwight Yoakam ballad all at once.

High above, blocking up the scenery, a billboard extols the alcoholic virtue of Johnnie Walker Red as a discordant array of shoe stores, watch shops and record dens elbow one another in a blitz of neon and flashing lights.

Once lovable icons of an America on the move, signs of all kinds are fast turning into a new and ubiquitous form of urban blight. It’s a visual anarchy of color and light described by some as “litter on a stick.”

“The suburban experience has become this frightening visual assault of vacu-formed, back-lit plastic signs with homogenized corporate logos glaring down from high-rise telephone poles marking the local spot where Twinkies and National Enquirers are sold,” said Jim Nelson, who helped create the flashy Universal CityWalk promenade. “It breaks my heart.”

He is not alone.

As signs get ever larger and brighter, municipalities throughout Southern California and the nation are trying to clean up the clutter, restricting signs in everything from size and color to location and shape. Sign vigilantes have emerged as well, ripping out or chopping down offending signs.

In dozens of California cities such as Agoura Hills and Anaheim, Los Angeles and Lancaster over the last few years, residents and officials have put signs in their sights, aiming to make them smaller, more tasteful and less intrusive. Few of the fights are quiet.

“It’s a very thorny issue,” said Jack Wong, community development director of Huntington Park. “For something as simple as a sign, there are a lot of emotions attached.”

To wit:

* In Thousand Oaks, a City Council meeting to approve an electronic sign advertising an auto mall turned into a nasty 90-minute argument among council members, each accusing the next of grandstanding and stifling public discourse. The sign, which opponents said was too garish, won approval last year on a 3-2 vote.

* In Anaheim, the city’s 26-year-old ban on new billboards has been attacked repeatedly by an outdoor advertising company that has donated thousands of dollars to City Council members’ campaigns. In 1994, the city vowed to uphold the ban.

* In Ventura, a bookshop owner went to war with city officials this year over a poster board sign advertising a new book. City rules require a permit for all signs not attached to a building. Finally, the owner relented and bought the $7 permit.

* In Lancaster, where real estate signs littered the roadsides, city officials cracked down on illegal postings by dispatching crews to rip them down. The issue became so emotional that two residents of nearby Acton were prosecuted for tearing down illegally posted development signs.

“Signs are obviously very necessary,” said Frank Vespe, spokesman for the Washington-based sign control group Scenic America. “We need signs to know where we are going and where we are. But the flip side of signs is that nothing can destroy the unique character of a community faster or more effectively than signs.”

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From the campy highway rhymes of Burma Shave to the omniscient eyes of Dr J. Eckelburg in “The Great Gatsby” to the Angelyne billboard on the Sunset Strip, signs have held a special place in American culture. Part of the allure of America was the idea that any cobbler or tailor could hang out a shingle and go into business.

That notion persists, and fights over signs often pit homeowners and preservationists against small merchants and big companies trying to stay in business.

“My feeling is that whenever you have a city council person that is anti-sign, that person has never owned a retail business,” said Wade Swormstedt, publisher of the trade magazine Signs of the Times. “They are academics or accountants, but they will never know the value of an on-premise sign. The on-premise sign is the absolute No. 1 source of advertising for any retail business.”

But Los Angeles architect John Kaliski said the disputes often have little to do with signs per se. “It’s really not about signage,” he said. “It’s about psychological control.”

Kaliski said the signs are symbols of an urban environment few people recognize from year to year. As changes sweep over neighborhoods, many residents feel powerless. The easiest targets are the most noticeable.

“There are all these issues of growth that can’t be controlled,” Kaliski said. “So the debate over signs becomes over who really controls the environment.”

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On rare occasions, the content of a sign flares tempers, as when a billboard depicted two popular disc jockeys sitting on the toilet with their pants around their ankles. Or when a clothing store used the slogan “Can’t Go Around Naked” on a billboard near a Winnetka school. Or when much of the San Gabriel Valley was in an uproar in the late 1980s over whether commercial signs should be in English or Chinese.

More often, the fuss is over the signs themselves, the largest of which can tower more than 100 feet in the air and take up more square footage than a studio apartment.

William H. Wilson, a professor at North Texas State University, wrote in the Journal of Urban History that although merchant signs have been around for centuries, they were mostly “small, stylized and unobtrusive” in the past.

“Post-Civil War developments changed all that,” Wilson wrote. “In the late 1860s, advertisers began leasing boards and patronizing a nationwide board-painting service.”

“There was a time in American society when there was much more of a love affair with signs and advertising,” said Jeff Turner, a partner in TSA Design Group, a Sherman Oaks firm that designs outdoor advertising. “But there are so many messages out there that the only way to get your message across is overkill. Advertising has become so redundant that it is impossible for people to separate good from bad.”

The rebellion against signs had its roots in the “City Beautiful Movement” in the early part of the century, but truly began to gain influence in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1965, the federal government enacted the Highway Beautification Act to regulate outdoor advertising. From 1966 to 1986, the number of signs along controlled highways nationwide decreased by about 700,000 to 390,000, according to the Outdoor Advertising Assn. of America.

Almost all cities in California have laws regulating how and where signs can be displayed, according to the governor’s office of planning and research. Many of the most restrictive laws were adopted during the unprecedented growth of the 1980s as residents and local leaders got fed up.

The goals of most of the ordinances are generally the same. They seek to shrink pole-mounted signs to a more human scale. Or to regulate the materials used in signs. Some mountain towns require merchants to erect carved wood signs in their touristy downtowns. Or to limit the number of signs. Or to cap their size. Or to restrict where on a building they can be placed. Even signs sporting the menus of drive-through restaurants are regulated.

For newer cities such as Irvine, all of these restrictions are fairly simple to implement. Once an ordinance is adopted, the new sign regulations can be incorporated into a merchant’s building or operating permit.

It is more difficult for older cities such as Los Angeles or Anaheim, where signs may have developed over several decades. Regulating or eliminating signs faces two constitutional challenges:

Signs can be considered speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment. They can also be considered property and are therefore protected by the 5th Amendment guarantee of just compensation.

Those obstacles are a major reason that many signs in Los Angeles do not comply with the city’s 1986 ordinance regulating them. Prior to the ordinance, merchants and outdoor advertising companies had almost free rein over how and where they erected their signs, creating discordant scenes like the one at Van Nuys and Ventura.

But the 1986 ordinance, like those adopted in many cities, avoids head-on collisions with the Constitution by restricting future signs, but allowing existing signs to remain until the property is sold or rebuilt.

In 1991, Anaheim banned new rotating signs--such as the bright orange Union 76 ball--but grandfathered in existing ones. Along Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, all new signs must comply with the rules of a strict specific plan, but old signs persist.

Other cities try to phase out--or amortize--signs over a period of time, telling merchants they have five or seven years to take them down. In Agoura Hills, a 1985 law bans tall pole-mounted signs. Merchants had until 1992 to remove the signs, but even today a handful remain and merchants are fighting the city in court. City elections have turned into referendums on the signs as candidates are judged in large part by their stance on the ban.

A private consulting firm concluded that the city would lose about $57,000 in sales tax revenues if the signs were removed, but many city officials contend that that loss would be recouped through other means.

“You can have thriving commerce without having visual blight,” Agoura Hills Councilwoman Fran Pavley said. “Look at places like Irvine or Westlake Village or Thousand Oaks. I don’t think those places are anti-business.”

But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that municipalities can carry their anti-sign zeal too far. In the woodsy St. Louis suburb of Ladue, Mo., officials barred a homeowner from displaying signs on her lawn and in an upstairs window protesting the Persian Gulf War.

Ladue officials said they feared “a proliferation of an unlimited number of signs (that) would create ugliness, visual blight and clutter.”

The high court said Ladue was wrong. Homeowner Margaret P. Gilleo was exercising her right to free speech and therefore could keep her sign.

Sometimes, sign opponents take the law into their own hands. Charles Brink of Acton was tired of seeing illegal real estate signs pop up all over his neighborhood--tacked several deep to telephone poles or tumbling down the street.

So he started ripping them down.

“People in the community have to help enforce the system,” Brink said. “We can all live with tasteful signs.”

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That is the attitude in Pacific Palisades, where residents successfully fought to restrict signs as part of a long-term plan for the community’s business district. Even now, almost a decade later, residents have been known to poke their heads into shops with improper signs in the windows and casually mention that they are forbidden.

In Orange County, enforcement is more regimented. A special crew cruises the streets in search of illegally posted signs--advertising everything from garage sales to open houses--and tears down all that they find.

“When a parkway has been landscaped with turf and plants and it is maintained, it represents a considerable investment,” said Dale Dillon, manager of field operations for Orange County’s environmental agency. “When you see them cluttered with signs, it detracts from the visual appearance. So we are more or less protecting our investment.”

But what does not work in Orange County might just play well elsewhere. Huntington Park’s Wong said signs should reflect the character of the neighborhood. “You can’t transfer the same theme or same concept to every community in Southern California,” said Wong, explaining that the swap meets in his town demand loud, garish signs and flashing lights. “It’s all part of the cultural milieu of shopping.”

Indeed, signs can add to the urban experience. That is part of the appeal of New York’s Times Square, London’s Piccadilly Circus, the Las Vegas Strip or even Universal’s CityWalk.

But, “you would be mad as hell if your neighborhood looked like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus or the Las Vegas Strip,” said Ventura County urban designer Stan Eisner.

Echoing Wong, Eisner said context plays a big role in determining whether a sign will be perceived as intrusive or as informative. As an example, he cited a drive he once took through the San Joaquin Valley. A billboard at the side of the road advertised a nearby gas station that offered a free color poster of the majestic Sierra Nevada with every fill up.

The only problem was, the sign was blocking the view of the Sierra.