An Olympian Cleanup Job for Athens

Athens is getting a face lift--not to hide age but to celebrate it.

The capital is cleaning up its cluttered skyline in an effort to restore some of the city’s ancient glory for the 2004 Olympic Games.

Armed with cranes and new legal powers, construction crews are tearing down advertising signs that obscure views of the 2,500-year-old Parthenon and other ancient monuments in the center of Athens.

Glaring ads for weight-loss clubs welded to the sides of buildings are coming down, as are insurance companies’ neon signs and rooftop billboards with giant pictures of hamburgers and cigarette packets.

City officials aren’t stopping at signs that block views. Attacking what many people have long considered eyesores, they are removing all 10,000 advertising signs downtown that are illegally placed above the first floor of a building.

The work is part of a $36-million urban improvement project to refurbish monuments and replace noisy roads that connect ancient sites with cobbled pedestrian walkways. Sign removal is expected to cost $685,000, after businesses are charged up to $2,700 for removing illegal signs.

“This is a very big task . . . there are signs everywhere,” says Yiota Goni, an official at the government agency in charge of the renewal project, known as the Unification of Archeological Sites in Athens.

The redevelopment project is Athens’ biggest since Greece won its independence from the Ottoman Empire some 170 years ago, when its main public buildings and roads were constructed.

Most of a new walkway around the Acropolis Hill, home to the Parthenon, has been finished. But generally the work is going slowly in a city crowded with more than 4 million of Greece’s 11 million people.

Each billboard takes hours to dismantle and can only be removed on weekends, when crews do not disrupt traffic or business. And most weekends, only one crew is working.

But Goni maintains that sign removal, which began last year, will be finished before the end of the year.

Not everyone is happy about the sprucing up.

Business owners are furious at losing their advertising. At least one came to blows recently with a construction crew dismantling a billboard.

Some Athenians are also upset about lengthy road detours caused by the work on the new pedestrian paths.

Others have little faith that much can be done to improve the looks of the heavily built-up city.

“At least the advertisements add some color,” said Marios Tsangaris, a 29-year-old musician. “If they take them away, there will just be gray buildings left.”