ABSTRACT
As industrial America grew, so did advertising outdoors. Handbills and broadsides for farm machinery, auctions, runaway slaves, stagecoach schedules, and theatrical performances had long fluttered on the walls outside inns and taverns. By the time of the Civil War, banners and posters for circuses and other celebrations comprised a good portion of the finery draping city buildings, past which might rattle a flamboyantly decorated advertising wagon. Painted patent medicine ads screeched their messages from rocks, trees, and fences. Gaslit signs illuminated blocks of New York City. To the titillation of many, sandwich men paced the streets with signs hung over their shoulders and display cases, hats, or other objects perched upon their heads.1 “Never a brick pile rises in any part of the city,” someone noticed in 1867, “but it is covered almost in a night with the fungus and mould of hot notoriety-hunting.”2 Growing cities became embroidered with the handiwork of the billposter and his minions, whose overlapping, multilayered mixed messages offered ephemeral companionship to the brick and mortar of rising buildings. These ads served as an apt symbol for burgeoning commercial culture as well as for the constant change and instability characteristic of the rapidly expanding and increasingly heterogeneous metropolis.3
