BILLBOARD CITY.(The Talk of the Town)(new outdoor structures)

In another era, a reference to New York's "street furniture" might have conjured images of mildewed orange sofas, three-legged coffee tables, and mangled desk lamps. But this is Michael Bloomberg's New York, where trash pickup never falters, and where no sponsorship or marketing opportunity is left unexplored. In a matter of weeks, the city will unveil its proprietary new designs for what Department of Transportation officials are calling a "unified streetscape" composed of sleek, and advertising-friendly, outdoor "furniture" that will replace existing civic structures, like bus-stop shelters and newsstands, and create new ones, like freestanding public toilets.

"Aesthetically, it's really going to look quite lovely," Iris Weinshall, the Transportation Commissioner, said the other day, at D.O.T. headquarters, where a group had convened to review the latest plans. All of the structures have a Jetsons-meet-Bauhaus feel--matte silvery metal, cantilevered roofs, and frosted-glass panels. ("The furniture is assembled from a 'kit of parts,' " a press release reads. "This component-based approach also gives the furniture a family identity and creates a common language across the transit system.")

More important, the project will generate revenue: Cemusa, the Spanish company that is installing and maintaining the structures, will pay the city a billion dollars for the right to sell advertising space on them for the next twenty years. The deal includes more than three thousand new bus shelters, three hundred and thirty newsstands, and twenty toilet enclosures, with the possibility of branching out into other poster-ready street fixtures, such as garbage cans. (Phone-booth contracts aren't up for another eight years, and, Weinshall said, "it would be difficult to put advertising on bike racks.")

Unlike the existing bus shelters, which are "effectively like tables that have been plunked down, where you can see all the bolts," the new designs, according to their creator, Duncan Jackson, are based on a "portal frame structure, with minimal ground fixings," for easier sidewalk sweeping. The city's Art Commission has rejected ...