Eyes on the Street: An Unnecessary Takeover of the 14th Street Plaza

In March, The Uni posted photos of a behemoth advertising installation in the pedestrian plaza on 14th Street and Ninth Avenue. Here it is as of late last week. We received reports that today it’s coming down.

For a solid two weeks, most of the plaza was reserved for cosmetics samples as passersby were blasted with amplified music.

Plaza users — people for whom this space was designed — were relegated to a small triangular area at the north end, where the view was dominated by the tail end of this thing, about the size of a bus.

Companies like Sephora can apply to use public spaces through the Street Activities Permit Office. It looks like the SAPO guidelines don’t prevent this kind of appropriation of public space to hawk products, at least on a temporary basis.