2012SummerEventSignage
This Event is in the past
And a Good Time was had by all.
We started in the Times Square Information Center where Our guide (Judy Richeimer, in black hat) showed us the Millenium ball dropped on January 1, 2000.
Outside we got an eyeful of Times Square signage
Looking at the signage at the Hersery's store at the corner of 48th and Broadway.
We wound up at John's Pizzaria on 44th Street between Times Square and Eighth Avenue. Good pizza and beer and conversation in what used to be the sanctuary of the Gospel Tabernacle Church built in 1888.
Society for Information Display – Mid-Atlantic Chapter
Thursday August 23, 11AM
Members and non-members of SID are welcome
Including Spouses and Children!
Tour will be limited to the first 20 people who sign up!
Lunch in a Times Square vicinity Restaurant at 1:30
SID-MAC Summer Event: Signage Tour of Times Square
This year we will take a walking tour of Times Square and explore some of the displays and signage prevalent there. Our guide will be Judy Richheimer. Judy Richheimer has been a licensed New York City tour guide for over 15 years. She is also a widely published freelance writer whose articles on culture and civic affairs have appeared in New York magazine, Vogue, Hollywood Reporter, and Details, among other publications. Judy’s tour will focus on displays, signage, and their history in Times Square.
Tour Abstract:
Times Square is extraordinarily unusual in terms of civic ordinances applying to billboards and other outdoor signage. Throughout the rest of New York City—and in most other cities, for that matter—outdoor signage is kept to a minimum; in Times Square it is against the law to not festoon your building with lights—that is, if the building went up after 1986. We will explore how this law, which is in three parts, has played out, and what kind of signage followed its inception. References will also be made to the "classic" era of signage in the Square, and how taste, technology and economics determined aesthetic differences between then and now.
On the tour we will:
· Marvel at several modern-day "spectaculars," breaking out how and why they were created.
· Look closely at some of the new interactive signs—a big fad in the Square throughout the last decade.
· Explore why some building owners chose to go non-commercial, and then look at building facades without paid advertising that were constructed under the ordinance– but remained perfectly legal.
· Analyze the content of some of the current signage and ask: who are their target audiences? (the answers may be surprising). And…
· Of course, no tour of display in the Square would be complete without at least some discussion of the famous ball. We can look at the centennial ball inside of the Times Square Visitors Center and then compare it—from a distance—to the current and far more amazing version in use today.
Time permitting, we will also enter the 44th Street Bowlmor Lanes and visit at least several of their unique rooms, each dedicated to a different era in New York City history.
Location: Meet at the Times Square Information Center
714 7th Ave. (east side of 7th, between 46th and 47th Streets, across from TKTS booth)
Date/Time: Thursday August 23, Meet at 10:45, Walking tour starts promptly at 11:00!
Lunch in at Times Square Area Restaurant about 1:00PM
Please RSVP to: secretary@sid-mac.org to help us plan this event. Limited to the first 20 people to sign up. If you don’t RSVP and you show up anyway, there may not be space for you on the tour or for lunch.