When Patricia Barragan opened her physical therapy practice in an office building on Santa Monica Boulevard, she picked the location in part because of the sweeping views.
With windows that look north toward the Santa Monica Mountains, the fourth-floor suite gave Barragan's clients a calming environment -- until last month, when her landlord covered the north side of the building with a two-story "supergraphic" advertising a global bank chain.
"When I came to work after Christmas, I had this horrible orange drape that diminished the light in my activity room and my treatment room by almost 40%," she said. "The first patients who came in at 7 o'clock said, 'What is this? This is depressing. I don't want to be treated in these depressing rooms.' "
Barragan is one of a growing number of workers furious that supergraphics -- large vinyl or plastic signs stretched across the sides of buildings -- are darkening their offices, wrecking their views and alienating their customers.
The multistory images, which can be bigger than the biggest billboard, have moved to the center of a long-running debate about outdoor advertising in Los Angeles, with at least a dozen supergraphics popping up in the month since the City Council approved a 90-day ban on new outdoor signs.
The outcry comes as the council struggles to come up with rules for regulating new outdoor advertising that won't be struck down as a restriction of free speech. Although the fight over billboards traditionally had been waged between advertising companies and neighborhood groups, office workers have entered the fray in a noisy way.
After the supergraphic went up on her building, Barragan contacted her building manager, then her lawyer and then her councilman's office to demand that the sign come down.
At 11600 Wilshire Blvd., dental hygienist Susan Rider complained to her building manager after a supergraphic image of the Statue of Liberty went up on the north and east sides of the five-story office building. At 10801 National Blvd., chiropractor David Allan created a crusading blog titled "10801 Take Sign Down Now" after a multistory advertisement covered the window of his fifth-floor office.
And at 6380 Wilshire Blvd., the firm known as Recon Research Corp. filed a lawsuit against its landlord last week, saying a 10-story supergraphic installed over the Christmas break transformed its office from a "conservative, prestigious environment into one that is crass and commercial."
