There’s a big black bear on Madison Avenue, presiding over the private school kids, museum-goers, ladies who lunch, and stroller-pushing nannies who pack the sidewalks there. He’s perched twenty feet above street level, on the giant, L-shaped billboard at the northeast corner of 84th Street, and he’s in town to announce the new outpost of LA-based designer James Perse. The sign, about twenty-five feet tall, wraps the top three floors of a small four-story building. It’s constructed from translucent white fabric that’s pulled tight over a steel frame. And it's entirely blank except for the stark black profiles of a grizzly bear and a five-point star, both icons lifted directly from the California state flag. The bear is about twenty feet high and lumbers left, on all fours, across the corner of the billboard, from the side street onto Madison Avenue. The star, five feet high, floats in front of him, right off the top of the sign.
There are trendy new boutiques popping up all over this neighborhood, just above and below 86th Street, but the sidewalk experience here remains stubbornly uninspired. The small storefronts, tucked along the bottom of limestone apartment blocks, have ladylike window displays and hand-painted signboards that cultivate a cloying, small-town feeling. So this bear lights up the place like an explosion. The immense black-on-white sign is graphically arresting, visible from over two blocks away, and builds excitement for the brand without flashing lights, bright colors or sexed-up imagery. The sign also makes an alluring dress for its building, a slim, postmodern steel and glass block. In daylight, from across the street, both the building and the screen’s delicate metal skeleton are visible behind the graphic in ghostly profile, and the tarp shimmers as if it’s taking breaths. It’s an eruption of life into the streetscape.
Photograph by Nalina Moses.
