How Dare It Openly Mock Those Broad, Unbroken And Ideal Sight Lines!

Everyone agrees that there is more than enough advertising in the city, some of which is actually illegal:

Patience and Fortitude, the lions that guard the New York Public Library, have beheld many things in their 95 years: numberless readers coming and going, great generals and brave troops passing by, legions of marchers celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and Pulaski Day, organized labor and gay liberation.

Now they behold two giant Scotch bottles.

In the sea of advertising that seems to have washed over construction scaffolding around New York City, the new six-story Chivas Regal billboard on 475 Fifth Avenue stands out because it dominates the landscape around the library’s colorful lawns, ample terraces and majestic staircase.

It is also illegal, the city says.

The Department of Buildings inspected the scaffolding this week and found six violations, three involving the sign, which faces Fifth Avenue and 41st Street.

(Wow, after yesterday’s howler, even more totally wacky, out-of-left-field David Dunlap prose!)

This, however, seems like a little bit of an overreaction:

The Institute of Classical Architecture is an educational organization dedicated to fostering the classical tradition, as epitomized by the library. Its office is two blocks from the library. And its president, Paul Gunther, said his blood boiled when he saw the Chivas sign.

“In open defiance of a law still without the teeth of enforcement,” he said in an e-mail message, “these glaring, scaffold-held billboards not only degrade this public — even sacred — space, but openly mock it, as if to announce, ‘Thanks for the broad, unbroken and ideal sight lines.'”

The best part: the violations only carry a $2,500 fine . . .