Billboard Liberation for Reclaim the Streets

Billboard Liberation for Reclaim the Streets
Activists Put Haight Billboards to New Use

SAN FRANCISCO, February 11th -- As of this morning, two San Francisco billboards in the Haight neighborhood may be causing more than a few double takes. Early this morning, Activists changed the text on two large billboards to display an unusual message. The billboards at Grove & Divisadero and a billboard at Haight & Stanyan, which until today contained advertiser's messages, now invite people to join "Reclaim the Streets," a march and renegade street party planned for noon on Saturday.

The billboard modifications were carried out in the early morning hours. On both boards, advertisers text was replaced with the new messaging. The new text and graphics on each board was designed to identically match fonts, colors, and styles of the original. Activists insist re-messaging billboards, also called "subvertising," is just one pleasant way to improve the urban landscape.

The newly modified billboards promote Reclaim the Streets. In fact, one of the changed billboards is at the meeting place for Saturday's march and street party, Haight & Stanyan. This Saturday February 14th, Valentines Day, San Francisco revelers intend to take back their public spaces, starting with reclaiming the streets of the Haight.

Reclaim the Streets is a global decentralized direct action movement which uses street parties to take back public space from cars, corporations and the police state, and return it to the public for socializing, bicycling, art, food, dancing, music, dissent, dialogue, community and creativity.

Stepping off the sidewalks into the streets brings us together, and allows us to challenge the dehumanization of our lives and the sterile world that accompanies it. Street parties are an opportunity to practice life as we’d prefer to live it -- full of color, community, and pleasure

Flyers and cards circulated widely throughout the Bay Area invite partiers to join RTS at noon on February 14th on the corner of Haight and Stanyan for a march to an undisclosed location for a renegade street party.

Streets and sidewalks are more than just ways to get where you are going, they are gathering points and destinations. Life used to be lived in the streets, not just in cars, living rooms, and cubicles. And car culture sucks. Cars are destroying our lives and the planet. They generate traffic, congestion, and pollution, they suck up our money, and they cause death and destruction wherever they go.

Reclaim the Streets first started in England in 1991 to protest the building of new roads through both urban and rural areas. It was revived in 1995 and has since spread to the U.S., Australia, Europe and South America. San Francisco RTS has been active since 1998.

For more info, please visit http://www.rts-sf.org and http://www.billboardliberation.com.