Sunset Strip billboard for porn site is gone but not forgotten
The racy new billboard on the Sunset Strip raised both eyebrows and questions that restaurant owner John Wolfe wasn’t comfortable answering.
For two weeks, a sign promoting the adult website Pornhub towered over Carneys, a popular hot dog and hamburger restaurant in a bright yellow rail car. Families walking into the restaurant faced the suggestive billboard.
One young customer eating with his father asked Wolfe, “What the heck are they thinking putting that thing up there?”
“You walk up my ramp, and the billboard stares straight at you,” Wolfe explained. “If you’re going to do something like that, put it in a strip club.... Kids were asking their parents about it.”
The billboard showed up one morning last month in West Hollywood, several days after the pornography website’s billboard with the same message was taken down in New York City’s Times Square.
Corey Price, Pornhub’s vice president, said the billboards in New York and West Hollywood were posted with the intention of pushing adult entertainment “into the mainstream consciousness and away from what most people conceive as being a taboo subject.”
“It’s not something to be ashamed of,” Price said in an email.
The Times Square ad was attached to a building occupied by the Hilton Doubletree hotel for two days before it abruptly came down, Price said. The billboard was taken down after complaints by the hotel’s general manager, he said.
In West Hollywood, suggestive billboards are nothing new.
A billboard from the dating website Cougar Life — which advertises that it pairs older women with younger men — was removed last year after complaints from the owner of a nearby nightclub.
The eye-catching billboard, near a farmer’s market, featured a breast-feeding mother and suggestive language.
After the Pornhub billboard went up, people stopped in the Carneys parking lot to take selfies with it. One man tweeted about the sign: “The world is officially coming to an end.”
Filmmaker Joshua Caldwell was driving in heavy traffic on Sunset Boulevard last week when he saw it.
“Had I not been in a hurry, I would have totally stopped for a photo,” he said. Porn “used to be this hidden thing no one really talked about.... It certainly made me do a double take.”
Lisa Belsanti, a city spokeswoman, said the city hadn’t received any formal complaints about the billboard. The city, she added, has no control over the content of privately owned billboards.
Calls to Regency Outdoor Advertising, which owns the billboard, were not returned.
But on Monday, when Wolfe looked outside his restaurant during the lunch rush, the porn ad was gone, painted over.
Pornhub said it had arranged to have the billboard up for only two weeks. The pornography site said that was long enough to get its message across.
Twitter: @haileybranson
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