Send Your Nasty Newsrack Pics to "Outrage!"

The way things go from day to day in Brooklyn and New York City generally, "Outrage!" could refer to everything from the construction site next door to a plan to toss food vendors from a local park. In this case, it's a photo contest being run by the Municipal Art Society, which is looking for the "dirtiest, most unkempt, most repulsive newsracks in New York City." We'll let the MAS explain:

The streets of New York City are littered with filthy, poorly maintained and decrepit newsracks that are both eyesores and potentially hazardous to New Yorkers.

Paris, London, Berlin and Amsterdam don't tolerate this scourge on their streets, and Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami Beach, Houston and San Francisco have cracked down on the newsrack blight too. But New York City continues to tolerate it, and we think this is outrageous!

Ridding our streets of these nasty newsracks is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it, and the Municipal Art Society needs your help. Submit your photographs of the dirtiest, most unkempt, most repulsive newsracks in New York City to our OUTRAGE! contest and help persuade elected officials that filthy newsracks are rotting the Big Apple and that they must commit to regulating them.

Contestants are invited to submit multiple photograph entries of the most disgusting newsracks they can find in the five boroughs (amusing caption optional) with cross-street details of where the offending newsracks are. Photos of newsrack eyesores that are also illegally placed (within 15 feet of a fire-hydrant, in a bus-stop, within 5 feet of a corner area, etc., will be given special consideration!) The winner will be rewarded for finding the worst newsrack in the city with a $100 gift certificate for Urban Center Books.

So, grab your camera, hit the streets and send something perfectly horrible to newsrack (at) mas (dot) org, and we'll pick the winning photo on the basis of sheer ugliness! Deadline for entries is Friday, September 14, 2007. Flickr users tag your pictures nastynewsracks or join our Nasty Newsracks group.

A couple of months ago, we ran a post about a solution that the Park Slope Civic Council is working on in Park Slope that has a lot of merit. The MAS push could help create sentiment for a solution.