I’m in Heidi Massa’s Lincoln Park apartment, 31 stories up. It’s 5:45 AM, and we’re looking out at her expansive view. The sun’s not up yet, and the sky and the city are the same misty shade—soft, early-morning gray, spangled with streetlights that mostly have a mellow, golden glow.
And then, I see, there’s another. A smaller sign, closer, but still perhaps a mile away, flaring red and white and magenta.
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This one is blocks away, but close enough, she says, that before she got it dimmed—before the company behind the LED billboard agreed to turn it off at 11 PM, and before it quit flashing white light between image changes—it turned the walls of this room into a light show.
That doesn’t inspire confidence in Massa, who began writing her alderman about LED signs in October 2007, and in the days before the highway billboard vote sent every alderman a series of e-mails that laid out the many reasons they shouldn’t approve it.
“The sign companies are going to say, we like these things because we can rotate the images,” Massa says. “Well, if all you care about is the rotational capacity, if the only difference between this and a traditional billboard is that the image can change every eight seconds, then make the intensity match the ambient light. And put in fade-in, fade-outs. That would go a very long way toward solving the problems of ugly and dangerous.”
