Image digitized by University of Cincinnati archives
Depending on the source, it is estimated that each American is confronted by 6,000 to 10,000 advertising messages every single day. That immersive media onslaught swelled as we started carrying little video screens around wherever we go, but invasive and obnoxious marketing has bothered Cincinnatians for much more than a century.
For example, on 20 July 1871, a correspondent for the Cincinnati Times related an enjoyable voyage he had undertaken down the Ohio River. After praising the service of his riverboat’s staff, the remarkable scenery along the river, the picturesque little town he floated by, the writer registered one complaint, about a cliff near the town of Hanging Rock:
“High up on the face of this wall of white sandstone, hundreds of feet beyond the reach of a scaling ladder, I noticed a patent medicine advertisement. It was penciled there by a man let down with ropes from above, and the letters are large enough to be read from the deck of a steamer two miles distant. I was sorry to see this defacement. It is bad enough that all the fences throughout the land should be made to lie for patent medicines without debasing the hill-sides with such marking. I suppose that when the ‘chemical affinity necessary to be the motor of some immense flying machine’ shall be discovered, some enterprising patent medicine man will be plastering the face of the moon with some of his ‘wonderful remedies.’”
If only the poor man knew what lay ahead! Even in the 1870s, almost every vertical surface in Cincinnati was slathered with posters, placards and bills advertising shows at the local theaters, patent medicines and political candidates. Cincinnati was the center of the bill-posting world. For one thing, Cincinnati was among the top printing cities of the United States, with the mighty Strobridge Lithographing Company dominating the poster industry.
Also, Billboard magazine was headquartered here in Cincinnati. What we now think of as a music magazine, Billboard was founded in Cincinnati as a trade publication for men who posted “bills” on walls. From its first issue in 1894, Billboard covered the entertainment industry, such as circuses, fairs and burlesque shows, and also created a mail service for travelling entertainers. Initially it covered the advertising and bill-posting trade and was known as Billboard Advertising.
Far from inspiring civic pride, advertising rankled Cincinnati residents as they witnessed visual pollution encrusting the region’s hillsides. Leading the opposition was the Municipal Art Society – a sort of ad-hoc predecessor to today’s Urban Design Review Board. The opening shot was fired 24 August 1896 when the Enquirer reported:
“A matter that will undoubtedly be of interest to the business men is the fact that war has been declared by the Cincinnati Municipal Art Society against advertising signs on fences along the car routes and drives of the city. The art society maintains that these signs mar the beauty of the city, especially in the case of landscape scenes on the hills and in the suburbs, and that they are offensive to the public taste.”
The Society was persistent. It took five years but the Cincinnati Post reported [24 November 1901] that the Baldwin Piano Company had demolished 200 feet of billboards erected on company property along Gilbert Avenue. The Post described this as the “first result” of the Society’s campaign.
Image digitized by Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County
The Municipal Art Society was soon joined by some strange bedfellows. The Cincinnati Business Men’s Club, among whose members were certainly a number of advertisers who employed billboards to disseminate their messages, created its own Municipal Art Committee to lobby for restrictions on outdoor advertising. On 1 June 1907, the committee circulated a postcard illustrated with a photo of signage clogging the view from the Grand Central Depot, with the sarcastic caption, “A Nice Welcome To Cincinnati.”
As early as 1895, the city chased the Fountain saloon’s advertising off Fountain Square, but appears not to have drafted a comprehensive law about outdoor advertising until 1909 when, as part of a broader safety ordinance, the city adopted limitations on the size of billboards, their placement near thoroughfares and the materials to be used in their construction.
While the city pondered how to encourage commerce while maintaining attractive views, the entire billboard industry was gaining momentum through a Cincinnati entrepreneur named Philip Morton. Before Morton, “bill boards” were basically fences on which bill posters slapped printed advertisements glued up with a flour-water paste. Morton took outdoor advertising to a new level, according to Jay Gilbert, who has researched his influence on marketing [Cincinnati Magazine, September 2016]:
“By 1898 he’d become the Steve Jobs of roadside blight. Doing business as Ph. Morton, Phil was an early pioneer of putting ads into free-standing frames called ‘bill-boards’ and plunking them down everywhere. Eventually every railroad route and motorway in America had its view ruined by a Ph. Morton billboard.”
Even the powerhouse Morton found himself in the city’s crosshairs. Parks Superintendent John W. Rodgers, according to the Enquirer [20 September 1907], exasperated by Morton’s billboards blocking the view of Inwood Park, erupted.
“Park Superintendent Rodgers yesterday tore down over 12,000 feet of big billboards that stretched along for a distance south of Hollister street, facing Vine street, in front of Inwood Park. The billboards were 12 feet high, about 1,000 feet long and contained the advertisements of leading firms of the city, and were illuminated at night with electric lights. They had been at that place for years.”
All of those billboards were leased by Philip Morton who, as coincidence would have it, dropped off a check to pay the lease while workmen were busily engaged demolishing his thousand feet of signage. This was the Boss Cox era in Cincinnati where the right hand was very often ignorant of the left hand’s activity. And so it was, while the Park Superintendent was demolishing billboards on Vine Street, the Board of Public Service pondered a lease for billboards along Gilbert Avenue. That’s right – the same Gilbert Avenue divested of billboards just six years earlier.
A common theme of cartoon artists at that time was the eventual coverage of all available exterior surfaces with advertising signs and slogans. In response, Cincinnati Post cartoonist Elmer Andrews Bushnell sketched City Hall wrapped from sidewalk to parapet in advertising while George Barnsdale Cox and his minion, August “Garry” Herrmann, happily apply more posters and Mayor Julius Fleischmann hides behind a billboard.
The battle raged for decades. Photographs from 1927 show dozens of billboards crowding the hillside over the Brighton overpass to Central Parkway and the Enquirer [24 March 1929] begged for relief because billboards and other unsightly structures had a negative effect on property values:
“What of the gaudy billboard that intrudes itself into a residential district, the sign which girds the tree or telephone pole, the roadside ‘shack’ which is made more ugly with bizarre advertisements? Do they affect values?”
A century later, we hardly notice billboards anymore. We’re too busy texting while we drive.
Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
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