441 
PARK AND CEMETERY 
IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATIONS 
CONDUCTED BY 
MRS- FRANCES COPLEY SEAVEY- 
THE POSTER EVIL, 
Is it not true that the poster, sticker, placard, every 
variety of advertising material that is to be indiscrim- 
inately pasted on any available surface, is one of the 
most flagrant and persistent offenders against, and 
wiliest enemies of, civic beauty ? And the metal placard 
that is intended to be hitched to anv convenient object, 
dead or alive, animate or inanimate, fixed or movable, 
belongs to the same insufferable class. There comes 
to mind in this connection a case that fell under our 
own eyes. The good-natured representative of a pat- 
ent medicine factory brought his family to summer 
in a rather inoffensive little village and this, in his 
mind, gave him complete liberty to hang metal tags 
(painted a brilliant yellow and lettered in black) on 
every conceivable object in every reachable place. 
Not content with attaching a few to each vehicle 
that entered the village, he capped his inventive 
genius b_v hanging close rows of them all over 
the butcher's delivery wagon, and twice a week 
it clattered out through the country roads with 
a jangle of sound distinctly suggestive of an ex- 
aggerated case of “rings on his fingers and 
bells on his toes.” This, however, was a mild 
and inoffensive misdemeanor from the point of 
view of the disfigurement of public good looks com- 
l^ared to the widespread and growing custom of de- 
facing dead w'alls, gutters, pavements, telegraph, tele- 
phone, electric light and trolley poles, fences, trees, 
rocks, bridges, etc., etc., with a motley assembly of 
small, medium or large posters or stickers, by way of 
advertising everything under the sun. The facts that 
the things so exploited and the matter contained on 
the posters may be unobjectionable or even desirable, 
cuts no figure. The method is bad, and the method is 
what we find fault with. That our way to town by 
elevated train, trolley, steam railway, carriage, bi- 
cycle or other vehicle, on horseback or on foot, shall no 
longer be outlined (frecpiently lined) by glaring no- 
tices or distracting and wholly irrelevant pieces of 
paper, is what we ask. 
This sort of defacement of public highways is call- 
ing unfavorable attention to itself by being grossly 
overdone and is really helping to bring about its own 
downfall. People are weary of passing along routes 
that are so conspicuously and incongruously “touched 
up.” Here and there a community is rising in its legal 
might to put a stop to the evil. For example, the city 
of Quincy, 111 ., has passed an ordinance prohibiting 
“the defacement of trees, tree-boxes, and telegraph, 
tf’lephone, electric light and trolley poles with placards 
and advertisements of every description,” and, better 
still, it is being strictly enforced. A man was arrested 
there recently and fined $io and costs in the police 
court for the violation of this ordinance, and, as a 
Quincy reporter said, “stopped in his work of deface- 
ment here, he went over to Hannibal and literally plas- 
tered that town with glaring signs, leaving it looking 
like a crazy quilt.” 
“Crazy quilt” is good, but the work of the placard 
sticker deserves a more severe appellation. It is erup- 
tive in character. 
The movement looking toward securing a national 
highway across the country, and good roads in gen- 
eral, should bring visions of shaded avenues, open 
vistas, winding, flower-hung driveways, and pictur- 
esque scenery. Alas, instead of these alluring pic- 
tures, fancy shows a continuous panorama where each 
view is deftly shut off by an immense billboard ; tree- 
lined avenues afflicted with a repulsive eruption of 
scraps of paper fresh from analine dye pots ; pictur- 
esque features that pose merely as the background for 
letters three feet high ; and flowering vines replaced 
by peeling, blistering and fluttering remnants of a pre- 
ceding attack of scarlet fever. Dear, dear! What’s 
the use of a grand national highway, and American 
Roman road, if it is to be used as a Midway for the 
display of the Chronic Poster Plague ! 
^ 
The women of San Francisco, not content with 
being a branch of the Women’s Auxiliary of the A. 
P. and O. A. A., have formed the California Outdoor 
Art League, an independent society in name, but af- 
filiated with the above organization. 
The new league was organized on May 28, during 
the visit of Mrs. Herman J. Hall, the Auxiliary Presi- 
dent, to California, and incorporated Aug. 12, 1902. 
It has issued an eight-page circular teeming with ex- 
pressions, quotations and opinions indicating a full 
appreciation of the meaning of civic beauty and genu- 
ine enthusiasm in setting about to produce it. Among 
the apt quotations used are the following, any one of 
which would serve admirably as the motto for an im- 
provement organization, and we wish to call the at- 
tention of the Minneapolis and other leagues to this 
fact (they having recently been shown to be in search 
of mottos) ; 
“The beautiful rests upon the foundations of the 
necessary.” — Emerson. 
“That is best which lieth nearest — 
Shape from that thy work of art.” — Longfellow. 
“Art which is to be made by the people and for the 
people is a happiness to the maker and to the user.” — 
William Morris. 
The California circular states that “the Outdoor 
Art League is the organized expression of a desire 
for civic beauty.” It contains testimony from the 
mayor, various officials, business men, editors, artists, 
