If you happen to have been on the Hudson or East River waterfront in Manhattan recently, there is a good chance that you might have seen a 60′ illuminated digital billboard on a barge passing by close to shore. The billboard features advertising pitching everything from beer to movies to helicopter rides. The company which operates the barge, Ballyhoo Media, considers it to be “the future of digital billboard advertising.” Many New Yorkers consider it to be a nuisance and an eyesore. The City of New York considers the billboard barge to be illegal and has filed a lawsuit to shut it down.
The suit alleges that the LED-illuminated seafaring signs along the Hudson and East rivers create a “public nuisance” that distract motorists and spoil the view for sightseers — and also are breaking local zoning laws.
“Our waterways aren’t Times Square. These floating eye-sores have no place on them,” said de Blasio in a statement about the suit. “Ballyhoo is operating in direct violation of the law, and we are filing this suit to put a stop to it.”
Complaints have been filed against the barge operators since it began cruising the city’s waterways in October. The billboards appear to be in clear violation of local zoning rules—”no moving or stationary advertising sign shall be displayed on a vessel plying waterways adjacent to Commercial Districts and within view from an arterial highway.” Under state navigation law, the jurisdiction of vessels operating within 1,500 feet of the shoreline would fall to the local legislative body.
This is not about politics, this is about just making New York and New Jersey just a little more habitable. Visiting the Hudson River is as much of an oasis as visiting Central Park or Prospect Park. Every other inch of New York is plastered with advertising. There are but a few places where one can stay in the City, to escape the City, to achieve some peace and serenity; the Hudson River is one of them. Ban this visual cacophony. And advertisers on this burdensome, bellicose, boorish barge, beware the power of the purse.
City idiots wanted to put one right at the end of or bridge that has 3 ways to turn, it was voter down.