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City Lights
11 August 2004
Few people visiting the Chinatown district of Los
Angeles after nightfall are aware of the fact that they are being watched.
Distracted by the smell of frying wantons wafting in the evening air and
the lure of import stores selling lacquered fans and Kung-Fu posters,
it’s easy to ignore the four-handed ornamental neon Buddha hanging
above the door of the K G Louie Company Art Store, following your every
step with his roving neon eyes.
Unless, of course, you’re spending a Saturday evening beetling around
metropolitan LA on the prowl for unusual neon signs. Under the tutelage
of urban anthropologist Eric Lynxwiler, who leads The Neon Cruise, a weekly
tour of LA’s city lights run by The Museum of Neon Art (MONA,) even
the most run-down and apparently insignificant piece of neon signage has
the potential to become an object of curiosity. Only a true neon connoisseur,
for instance, would know that the unimposing “Music Hall”
sign above the Variety Arts Theater in downtown LA has rearrangeable letters
or that the Bonaventure Hotel, with its color-themed neon-silhouetted
glass elevators flying up and down its façade, is home to the city’s
last rotating cocktail bar.
Despite the fact that the most famous local landmark, the Hollywood sign,
lost its nighttime luminescence just before World War II, Los Angeles
is a neon-lover’s paradise. The three-hour tour, which – bar
stops in Chinatown and at Cantor’s Jewish deli in Fairfax –
is experienced entirely from the open-top of a double-decker bus, passes
by many of Hollywood’s most gaudy lights. Movie Theaters and tourist
spots on the trail include The Kodak Theater, where the Oscars ceremony
is held each year, the Guinness World of Records Museum, and Frederick’s
Lingerie, which houses the likes of Madonna’s bustier and Phyllis
Diller’s training bra.
But the true highlights of the Neon Cruise are far removed from the pizzazz
of the Walk of Fame. Offbeat gems such as the eleven-foot-tall yellow
and purple neon Heart of Christ sign on the Holy Superet Light Church
in the Rampart district, the sound-activated corridor of flashing, rainbow-hued
hoops at the entrance of the Jewelry District’s International Jewelry
Center, and the yellow, neon rats scampering across the bottom of the
enormous Western Exterminator Company sign just off the Hollywood Freeway
near Virgil Avenue, are what really differentiate the Neon Cruise from
other city tours. Indeed, the Cruise doesn’t just visit the ritzy,
touristy areas. In Crown Hill, for instance, a sorry-looking liquor store
sign winks a solitary bulb in half darkness, and in historic downtown
LA, the once magnificent Hotel Cecil roof-top sign hasn’t had its
neon tubes replaced in a while. These days, the sign simply says “Ho
Cecil.”
While the sheer density of neon in LA makes the city look like a particularly
overwrought Christmas tree, the neglected state of many of the city’s
neon signs is evidence of the decline of LA’s neon heritage. Soon
after Packard car dealer Earle C Anthony erected the USA’s first
neon sign, shipping the word “Packard” in blue-fringed orange
neon from Paris, France to LA in 1923, neon became a fixture of the American
urban landscape. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, despite the Depression,
neon experienced its heyday. Designers O.J Gude and Douglas Leigh led
the field of neon advertising, with Leigh being responsible for such spectacles
as the famous Camel sign that blew smoke rings on Times Square in New
York. On the west coast, architect S. Charles Lee embellished movie palaces
with animated neon marquees and neon restrooms.
With the slow economy in the World War II years, fewer signs were commissioned
and old signs fell into disrepair. The development of plastics during
the war led to the rise of cheap, mass-produced backlit plastic signs.
According to Let There Be Neon by Rudi Stern, from the 5000 who were working
at the end of the war, the number of skilled neon tube benders dropped
to fewer than 500 by the early 1970s. As Lynxwiler put it, demonstrating
his aversion to LA’s profligate Burger King and Coin-Op Laundromat
signs with a disparaging wave of his Radioshack megaphone, “backlit
plastic killed the radio star.” These days in the US, only Las Vegas,
LA, Route 66 and The Burning Man Festival can claim to be true neon oases:
even Times Square has exchanged its Noble gas-filled glass tubes for flat
plasma screens, LEDs and backlit plastic.
Founded in 1981 and appropriately located right across the street from
the old Packard building on Olympic Avenue, MONA has a double mandate:
to preserve the country’s neon heritage and nurture contemporary
neon art, a genre which grew in conjunction with the decline of commercial
neon and with the increasing availability of once-scarce materials through
technological advances. Neon Cruise passengers can precede the tour with
a visit to the museum. The vintage sign collection creates a particularly
strong contrast to the conventionally displayed contemporary artworks
exhibited by MONA, coolly glowing against the museum’s pristine
white walls. Wheezing asthmatically with their ancient transistors, the
old signs, many of which have been rescued by MONA from the trash heap,
are haphazardly strewn around the floor and piled on top of one another.
One sign, a round General Electric sign from the 1960s, is displayed in
the original wooden crate in which it was shipped. In another corner,
a once-animated Hofbrau beer sign featuring a chubby man holding a beer
stein, awaits an overhaul. When fully operational, the beer stein fills
up and foams, causing the drinker to grin.
MONA’s Neon Cruise isn’t just a mobile lightshow: it’s
a vivid prism through which to view the cultural, social and architectural
development of LA over the decades. In Chinatown, for instance, where
every rooftop was once silhouetted with candy-coloured neon piping, the
1970s energy crisis came along and away went the rooftop lights. And in
the Theater District, the façade of the one time ritzy State movie
palace on Broadway now trumpets the words “Iglesia Universal”
while the mantra “Jesus Saves” radiates devilish red neon
from the tops of two adjacent buildings nearby. As Lynxwiler put it, “neon
signage says much more than “liquor,” “motel”
and “live nude girls.””
If you go
MONA operates the Neon Cruise every Saturday from 7.30pm to 10.30pm from
early June until the end of October. The tour, which includes refreshments,
begins and ends at the Museum. Visitors can arrive at the museum from
6.45pm to view the museum’s current exhibitions and permanent collection
of vintage signs.
MONA members $35; Non-members $45.
Museum Hours: Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm and Sunday from 12pm to
5pm excluding major holidays. Second Thursday of the month from 5pm to
8pm, free admission.
Admission: $5 for adults; $3.50 for students and seniors; children under
12 accompanied by an adult, free.
MONA
501 West Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90015
Tel: 213 489 9918
http://www.neonmona.org
info@neonmona.org
Copyright 2004, The San Francisco Bay Guardian.
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