CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The downtown Cleveland building that once featured a huge image of LeBron James could soon display a different civic image: A night view of the Cleveland skyline, courtesy of the Sherwin-Williams Co.

The paint and coatings company is asking city design and planning officials to approve plans for the huge banner, which would cover a wall left empty this summer after James announced his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.

Instead of a basketball player tossing chalk, the banner would show illuminated skyscrapers as seen from the Cuyahoga River. Above them, the words "Our Home Since 1866. Our Pride Forever." In one lower corner is the Sherwin-Williams name and logo.

Sherwin-Williams owns the building, the Landmark Office Towers where the company keeps its headquarters and about 2,000 employees. Since crews tore down James's image in July, the company has been considering options for the blank space, a wall designed to abut another tower than was never built.

"As we talked about the opportunity to put something up there, we thought about celebrating Cleveland," said Ellen Moreau, the company's vice president of marketing communications. "There are so many great things about Cleveland, so many reasons to be here. We're just really proud to be in the city."

Moreau said the billboard is not meant to be a jab at James. During the past few months, various advertisements scattered across Cleveland have played on or poked fun at the James billboard and its "Witness" message, which was sponsored by Nike. Cliffs Natural Resources Inc., a mining company based in Cleveland, launched its own Witness ads showing a coal miner with his arms outstretched, under the tagline "A team that hasn't left in 163 years."

A city design review committee is scheduled to discuss the Sherwin-Williams image Thursday. Billboards generally are prohibited downtown, though several decades-old ones linger from before the city changed its zoning code. But the city does allow on-premises advertising by businesses that occupy the buildings or properties where they want to display an ad. And Robert Brown, Cleveland's planning director, said the skyline photograph with the small Sherwin-Williams tag is not necessarily advertising.

"It's really a civic image showing the city of Cleveland," he said. "It could be akin to Sherwin-Williams sponsoring a civic image."

Design and planning officials would need to make an exception for the size of the image, which would hang from the same mounts that held the iconic LeBron banner.