ABSTRACT
Daily, more than one hundred thousand vehicles pass the beginning of eastbound Interstate 80 at the western approach to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Rarely is this approach tagged with graffiti, because of the physical danger and its location beyond the purview of most tagging, which tends to be neighborhood oriented. Billboard space viewable from the bridge approach rents for more than $120,000 a year. One billboard, removed in the fall of 1999, faced away from the approach, pushing cigarettes, liquor, and other products to slow-moving street-level traffic heading toward, or under, the massive bridge. This is normal enough, and is repeated untold thousands of times throughout the United States, as advertisers seek to expose their products to the public by controlling a segment of public visual space, but there are two sides to this routine-to this and all other billboards.
