Neon Nostalgia From Times Square to Be Sold by Sign Maker (Published 2006) (2024)

The heyday of electric signs in Times Square has given way to the era of digital video screens and giant vinyl billboards. This week, like so many things in Times Square, nostalgia itself will be for sale when a Philadelphia auction house sells an eclectic collection of drawings, models and neon signs, all vivid reminders of the brightly lighted advertisem*nts that have long hovered over Broadway.

The collection is being sold by Artkraft Strauss, which made and maintained some of the most recognizable incandescent and neon advertising signs in New York City for decades. The family-owned business, which has shrunk in recent years, has sold off its billboard business and production plant and is refashioning itself as a design consultancy.

Among the objects in the auction is a 1940 pencil drawing for the famous Camel cigarette ad that hung off the Claridge Hotel on the southeast corner of 44th Street and Broadway from 1941 to 1966. For a quarter-century, every four seconds between 7 a.m. and 1 a.m., a piston-driven diaphragm forced steam collected from the hotel through a small hole in the billboard, creating the impression of cigarette smoke.

The Camel ad was probably the most famous of the giant ads, known as spectaculars, that defined Times Square.

"Times Square is changing and times are changing," said Tama Starr, 59, the third generation of her family to run Artkraft Strauss. "The days of the handcrafted neon spectacular are pretty much gone with the 20th century. We built all these one-of-a-kind, fantastic displays throughout the century, but now, in the 21st century, the medium is electronic: computer-controlled light-emitting diodes; big video screens; the big pictorials printed by giant drum printers on vinyl. The art — or craft or trade — of painting is gone."

An auction house, Freeman's, will conduct the live public auction on Thursday at its gallery in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Among the 73 lots on sale are emblems of shows promoted overhead in Manhattan, from Broadway musicals to television series.

There is another pencil sketch, for the electric sign advertising Canadian Club whiskey that hung over Broadway for 25 years until 1977.

There is a 1962 marquee from the original run of the musical "The Sound of Music." The title is in big, block, white enamel letters, filed with scores of light bulbs, mounted on a steel frame. Each letter is about 14 inches high.

There is a giant pink "S" that adorned one of the Times Square subway entrances, with dozens of flashing light bulbs, around 1985.

Then there is a nearly six-feet-tall lowercase letter "i" — made of metal, coated in dark-red enamel, with red neon tubing — that hung over Columbus Circle, from 1998 until last year, on a giant message board promoting the A & E cable television series "Biography."

The "i" was on display in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, "Transformed by Light: The New York Night," which closed on May 7.

Gregory K. Dreicer, the curator of the exhibition, said that electric signs — the earliest were erected in the 1890's — were symbols not only of commerce and commercial power, but also of entertainment and pleasure.

"The image of New York City, whether it's Times Square or Herald Square, is shaped by light, although people take it for granted," he said yesterday. "Just as the city is built of steel, concrete or brick, it is also built with light."

Ms. Starr was co-author of a 1998 book, "Signs and Wonders: The Spectacular Marketing of America," that traces the history of electric signs, and she researched the objects that are for sale. She said that she wanted to see the family business survive, though in a much reduced form, but also that she wished to pursue more writing.

The company began as a small sign-painting and gold-leafing studio in 1897. It produced the first New Year's Eve ball — a 600-pound iron sphere swathed in 100 25-watt light bulbs — to be dropped above Times Square, on Dec. 31, 1907.

At its height the company, working with the designer Douglas Leigh, created sparkling signs that transfixed New Yorkers. One was a blocklong, 90-foott-tall ad for the Bond clothing store, one block north of the Camel smoker, which Mr. Leigh also designed.

"Leigh ordered up 50-foot-high plaster casts of heroically proportioned nudes, a man and a woman, with swags of golden neon draped across their torsos like togas," James Traub wrote in "The Devil's Playground," a 2004 history of Times Square. "At night, they seemed to be wearing evening gowns of light, and nothing else."

Ms. Starr's grandfather, Jacob Starr, who bought the business from its founder, died in 1976 and her father, Melvin, died in 1988. She bought out her younger brother, Jonathan, in 1994.

Brent Lewis, who is overseeing the sale for Freeman's, said he expected it to fetch at least $100,000, and possibly several times that. The auction was first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Not everyone is happy to see the collection sold. "I hate to see stuff dispersed and end up in private collections, never to be seen again," said Tod Swormstedt, who runs the American Sign Museum, a small nonprofit institution that opened in Cincinnati last year. Mr. Swormstedt, 52, is also from a family in the sign business. His younger brother publishes Signs of the Times, an industry publication with a circulation of nearly 20,000.

Although Mr. Swormstedt is contemplating making a bid for some of the items, he said that when he learned of the sale, "it was a sad thing to hear."