byAllison Meier
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The neon sign for the former Rocco Restaurant, now Carbone, in Greenwich Village (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
Neon and New York City had their ups and downs over the 20th century, from the glowing signage being an innovative advertisem*nt in the 1920s and ’30s to already telegraphing seediness with its flickering in the 1940s and ’50s. Neon has had a resurgence in signage for fashion boutiques that are banking on thatvisual nostalgia, yet the actual historic signs are disappearing. When an old business moves out, their decades-old neon often goes, too.
“I wanted to go photograph them while they were there to photograph,” said Thomas E. Rinaldi on his July 7 walking tour of neon in Greenwich Village organized by Untapped Cities. Rinaldi has spent years researching neon andjourneying around the five boroughs to find the oldest surviving signs, which were sometimes already gonebetween when he spotted them on Google Street View and arrived at their location. Our tour started outside Film Forum on West Houston (which has its own newer neon), wherea 1930s metal neon sign that’s now covered with an advertisem*nt forUnited Alarm Systems just had itstip visible through scaffolding.
The United Alarm Systems sign, which covers the frame of an old neon sign, sticking out from the scaffolding (click to enlarge)
In 2012, Rinaldi publishedNew York NeonwithW. W. Norton & Company.He alsoruns a blog of the same name where he shares upcoming tours (next is September 21)and recent discoveries, such asthe drugstore signage bydesigner Charles J. Klein, and losses likethe old Shore Theatre sign on Coney Island that was damaged duringHurricane Sandy in 2012 and later removed,or the animated Colony Records signat 49th and Broadway removed in 2004.Others just extinguish and are never repaired, like a time and temperature sign we visited on Sixth Avenue that hovers darklyabove the entrance to a Bank of America.
“Some of the signs that I most remember enthusing over as a kid in the ’80s are actually still there: the Dublin House, Nathan’s Famous,” Rinaldi told Hyperallergic. “Some of them I was able to photograph before they vanished, like the P&G Bar. A few I remember disappearing when I was far too young to photograph them: an amazing old TVandappliance store off the Major Deegan in the Bronx, housed in a quonset hut, for instance. If there were a few that motivated me to get out there and start taking photos, I’d name the Times Square HoJo (the sign actually wasn’t that old), the Variety Theatre on ThirdAvenue near 14th Street, McHale’s Bar on EighthAvenue, and the Colony Recordssign with the girl in a poodle skirt leaping up into the air, holding a record.”
He adds that those signs all vanished rather recently, between2002 and2005. Landmarking is often not straightforward for neon, even when it’s historic, as the ownership by the building orthe business is sometimes unclear. There are exceptions, such asthe 1930s Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City which received landmark status earlier this year after being considered by the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission for nearly 30 years.
Historic neon on Casa Oliveira Wines & Liquors on Seventh Avenue
Historic neon on Casa Oliveira Wines & Liquors on Seventh Avenue
Neon was discovered as a gas in 1898, and researchers found it glowed red when in a vacuum-sealed tube. In the 1920s, almost all the neon signs were this radiant red, although some were blue and actually containedargon. Later, phosphorus-coated tubes allowed a rainbow of hues. Foraficionados there’s a lot of love for the clear red and blue where the dynamic natureof the gas ismore visible.
Zoning changes in the 1960s that limited protrudingsigns, as well as the expense of maintenance, caused neon to fall out of favor.However, ithad already taken a character hit when author Raymond Chandler emphasized it as a tawdrysetting in his 1940Farewell, My Lovely, and film noirs in the same era regularly had signs illuminating streets prowled by femme fatales and hard-boiled detectives.“There were neon signs for churches before there were neon signs for bars,” Rinaldi explained, butthe connection between neon and seedy nightlife was set. In more recent decades,cheaper signs like LEDs continue to replace the remaining labor-intensive examples.
The closest you can get to the neon-packedcommercial zonesof early 20th-century Manhattan is MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Signs like the one for Monte’s Restaurant that dates to the 1950s, witha rare figurative work depictinga chef holding a steaming bowl of pasta, mingle with newer illuminationsthat contribute to the atmosphere that has long been associated with the area. (Jack Kerouac in one of his author portraitswas photographedin front of the Kettle of Fishneon sign on MacDougal.) New York City has never had the elaborate neon of Route 66 or Las Vegas, yetsurviving signs often indicatea localbusiness that has endured through decades of urban change.
Neon signs on MacDougal Street
Historic neon sign for Monte’s Restaurant on MacDougal Street
A (non-historic) psychic sign in neon
Neon on Arthur’s Tavern, with signs that used to sport neon on Marie’s Crisis
Newer neon work on Waverly Restaurant
Historic neon at C. O. Bigelow Pharmacy
New York Neonby Thomas Rinaldi is available fromW. W. Norton & Company. The nextGreenwich Village neon tour is on September 21.
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Allison Meier
Allison C. Meier is a former staff writer for Hyperallergic. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering visual culture and overlooked history for print and online media since 2006. She moonlights...More by Allison Meier
I’ll chip in one more here…
Great! And this photo has a nice inebriated, Gershwin “American in Paris” style to it.
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