Billboards in Law

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 27, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 42.

Billboards in Law.

Justice Seabury of the New York Supreme Court, in a recent decision against unseemly and unsightly billboards, declared: “Such signs being outside the building line, it is doubtful if the municipal authorities could lawfully have authorized their erection. The streets or highways are public property. The streets, including the sidewalks, belong ‘from side to side and end to end’ to the public. Abutting owners have no right to appropriate this public property to private uses. The erection of billboards or signs upon or over public property is an appropriation of public property to private uses, and is no more sanctioned by the law than is the public appropriation of private property.”

He held, too, that “the presence of the billboards upon the public highway is a mere nuisance which the municipal authorities will do well to abate.”