1/11/14
Out amid the discarded macaroni salad containers, Carls Jr. cups and spray-painted graffiti tags along U.S. Highway 101 in south Arcata, the culture wars are heating up.
Another billboard along the U.S. Highway 101/Humboldt Bay corridor was cut down last Thursday, this one advertising mattresses for Living Styles furniture store. It was almost immediately re-erected, after a fashion.
1/11/14
In secret the sign was chopped down, and in secret it has been re-erected. Sometime between last night and this morning, the Living Styles billboard near the Gannon Slough Bridge (just south of Arcata on Hwy. 101) was repaired in violation of a red tag placed on the structure by the City of Arcata.
1/10/14
Looks like our local George Hayduke has struck again. Barely a week after a Bailey Mortgage billboard was felled on the 101 safety corridor, another plank has taken a face-plant, this one near the Gannon Slough bridge just south of Arcata. And the severed support beams bear the telltale signs of human mischief.
1/10/14
While authorities are seeking whoever chopped down a billboard along the southbound lanes of the U.S. Highway 101 Safety Corridor, the real mystery may be just who owns the land beneath it — and whether the Eureka-Arcata Route 101 Corridor Improvement Project will prevent the fallen billboard from ever rising again.
Posted 1/3/14
Note: this column appeared in the Dec. 11, 2013 Mad River Union. – Ed.
When I read that Caltrans estimates the cost of removing the billboards along U.S. Highway 101 between Arcata and Eureka at $2 million, my first thought was “Bleep, I know guys who would do it for a can of gas for their chainsaw and a six pack.”
My second thought was that if the fight goes on long enough, climate change will take care of the problem for us. I commuted between the two cities from 1990 to 1994, and during that time, a massive wind storm toppled several of them into matchsticks.
