ABSTRACT
Both the warring women, named “scenic sisters” by scornful outdoor advertisers, and their billboard “brethren” (also called “boys” and oftentimes “barons”) were cultural producers and arbiters of the road and the roadside environment.5 Both sides sought to define the proper use and appearance of the public space of the road and roadside and both factions asserted their rights as private citizens to profit from the public highways. They also agreed to their respective gender roles, and exploited these fully. They did disagree concerning which legal (and extralegal) means could maintain their priorities constitutionally.6 They also differed, in essence, on what comprised the real value of the roadside. To outdoor advertisers that value was simple to gauge. Outdoor advertisers had to produce potential consumers wherever automobiles might take them, which by the 1920s was already quite far out. To the billboard industry, the value of the roadside was no different from the value of any space or place; it was determined entirely by its ability to reach these consumers. The roadside reformers, however, had a much more subtle and indeed prescient vision of where automobiles, roads, and urban decentralization were headed-directly toward sprawl. If the automobile helped one escape the city, what was the point of having the urban signs of commerce, work, and markets leading the way? To the reformers, the very value of the automobile and the road would be deflated if signs of commerce were to be found everywhere the car could go. Some spaces had to be saved as bucolic and scenic, or else people would have no sane reason to get into their cars in the first place. That is to say, while outdoor advertisers had an utterly commercial ideal of the roadside’s value, reformers thought the roadside might have an aesthetic value as well, indeed one worth preserving.
