Times Square Gets Its Biggest Billboard Ever

Walgreens is putting up the new multicomponent, 250,000-pound sign, that will be programmed from street level to 341 feet high at the top of the building, on the traffic island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street. Best known as the mother ship for a patchwork of billboards and the place where the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, the building was originally called the Times Tower.

The sign will have 12 million light-emitting diodes, known as L.E.D.’s — 17,000 square feet of them, “which is more than a third of an acre,” said Arthur Gilmore, president of the Gilmore Group, a Manhattan design and branding consulting firm, which created the sign. “Including its digital and vinyl decorative components, it will be 43,720 square feet in area.”

The sign will show the flag of the Walgreen Company, the nation’s largest drugstore chain in sales, which is promoting a new three-level, 16,200-square-foot emporium in the building’s ground-floor retail space, which has been empty for seven years.

The new spectacular “will be larger than any sign in Times Square,” surpassing the current behemoth, the 11,000-square-foot Nasdaq sign on Broadway at 43rd Street.


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