Neon Museum

Neon History Restored While the Neon Boneyard and its three illuminating acres of Vegas history are definitely worth the effort it takes to see them, sometimes it’s hard getting out there. Maybe you’re crunched for time or came down for the weekend on a whim. Whatever your excuse, don’t worry, you can still see a little slice of the Boneyard on a self-guided walking tour of 10 fully restored neon signs, all located downtown. The Hacienda Horse and Rider Location:The intersection of the Fremont Street Experience and Las Vegas Boulevard. Origin:Part of the Hacienda Hotel, 1967   Aladdin’s Lamp Location:The northwest corner of the Fremont Street Experience and Las Vegas Boulevard Origin:Part of the Aladdin Hotel, 1966   The Flame Restaurant Location:The southwest corner of the Fremont Street Experience and Las Vegas Boulevard Origin:Part of the restaurant of the same name, 1961.   Chief Hotel Court Location:The northeast corner of the Fremont Street Experience and 4th Street. Origin:Part of the Chief Hotel, 1940s.   Andy Anderson Location:The southeast corner of the Fremont Street Experience and 4th Street. Origin:Part of the Anderson Dairy building, 1956.   Wedding Information Location:Neonopolis, near the Fremont Street Experience Origin:Unknown, 1940s.   Red Barn Location:Neonopolis, near the Fremont Street Experience Origin:Part of the bar of the same name, 1960.   Nevada Motel Location:Neonopolis, near the Fremont Street Experience Origin:Part of the Nevada Motel, 1950.   Dot’s Flowers Location:Neonopolis, near the Fremont Street Experience Origin:Part of the Dot’s Flowers floral shop, 1949.   5th StreetLiquor Location:Neonopolis, near the Fremont Street Experience Origin:Part of the 5th Street Liquor store, 1946.     Information courtesy of the Neon Museum Web site, www.neonmuseum.org.

The easiest way to describe the feeling you get inside the fences at the Neon Boneyard is to imagine a giant shoe, a shoe bigger than your refrigerator, a shoe bigger, or so it seems, than the tiny space of your first apartment.

Imagine this shoe covered in light bulbs and peeling metallic-colored paint, sitting in the middle of a dusty lot in downtown Las Vegas. Staring up at it, you realize your own shoe, the one strapped to your foot and tied with sloppy knots, isn’t even big enough to be an annoying piece of gum stuck to this giant shoe.

Meet the Silver Slipper. Weighing in at two tons and towering 15 feet high, it’s one of the first indications you’re among giants.

The slipper, a relic from the casino of the same name, and its more than 150 friends make up the Neon Boneyard, which in turn makes up a large part of the Neon Museum, which in turn makes up a Goliath-size chunk of Las Vegas history.

For more than 15 years these giants, most made, appropriately, from some form of neon and collected from across Las Vegas, have been saved from the trash heap and cherished for what they are and what they can do – tell tales of Las Vegas’ past, a tall order, to be sure, in a city known for tearing down the old to make room for the new.

Nancy Deaner, chairwoman of the Neon Museum Board of Trustees, has been part of the effort to preserve Vegas’ neon signs since the late 1980s. Deaner said sometime during that decade, Las Vegas residents were growing concerned that signs were being destroyed, with no hope of getting them – or the history that went with them – back again.

“There’s a lot of remembrance attached to the signs,” Deaner said. “Not just for locals, but for people all over. The signs have their own cachet, they really have iconic status.”

The citizens formed what would eventually evolve into the Neon Museum Board, and with a little help from the City of Las Vegas, began the process of preserving some of the city’s brightest fossils.

For a while, the old signs sat on a lot at YESCO (the Young Electric Sign Company), the company that constructed many of them. Although the signs moved to their current location 10 years ago, their old digs can be seen in scenes from the movies “Mars Attacks!” and “Vegas Vacation.”

As word spread about these neon dinosaurs, nearly 200 visitors a week were stopping by YESCO, said Melanie Coffee, operations manager for the Neon Museum. Unable to handle the crowds and continue their primary business of making signs, the folks at YESCO agreed to move them elsewhere.

“Elsewhere” turned out to be that dusty lot in downtown Las Vegas where they’ve been for the past 10 years and where they’ll be for years to come, hopefully in a setting the public can come by and enjoy.

The Boneyard is currently open by appointment only, meaning you can’t just stop in and check out the sights. But plans are in the works to turn it into an operating Neon Museum (hence the board’s name). Disassembled pieces of the La Concha Motel lobby, one of Vegas' few remaining odes to Googie architecture of the '50s and '60s, sit in the Boneyard today, waiting to be put back together as the museum’s visitor’s center.

The board, and the museum, operate not-for-profit, so any improvements or changes need to be paid for through donations and that money needs to come from somewhere. Deaner said a lot of fundraising is ongoing and the City of Las Vegas is continuing to help out, awarding the project $4.5 million in federal funds to be used to develop a neon park.

And these aren’t just pipe dreams. Deaner said the board is hoping to have things completed in the next year and a half and is confident that people are interested in seeing the museum.

“This is the way we save our history,” she said. “And I think people get it, people all over the world get it. There’s a demand for this. It’s kind of like quintessential Americana. [The signs] really represented what people were thinking about during those eras.”

Signs in the Boneyard run the gamut, with a couple even dating back to the 1940s. It’s a rare chance to see up close what is usually perched atop a marquee or bolted up high on a building.

Letters from signs from many of Vegas’ landmark hotels – the Sahara, the Stardust, the Showboat – are scattered around the property like alphabet soup. A recent episode of the television show “CSI” was shot with a body found on a peg of the “W” from the Showboat sign.

Although the letters can easily be pinched between two fingers when they’re displayed 80 stories up, it’s a different world when they’re on the ground. Paint strokes and individual light bulbs are actually discernible and the craftsmanship that went into things like the hat from the Tam O’Shanter Motel can be fully appreciated. Not to mention that feeling of being surrounded by giants.

As you wander among a chess piece (a knight) taller than most elementary school children and a pool player so large locks of his hair had to be composed from rebar, it’s pretty easy to sympathize with the few clusters of ants that have made their home in the Boneyard. A slot king that can be made headless at a moment’s notice (if you have a crane handy) and a pirate skull bigger than anything in the Caribbean don’t help assuage your sudden inferiority complex.

Plus, the collection is still growing. Unlike the old days when Deaner said they’d have to practically stop signs on their way to the dump, people actually volunteer their signs now, she said.

“When the project first started, we were begging people for signs,” Deaner said. “Now people are calling us. It’s like night and day – now our phone rings. People really want these things saved.”

And a spot in the Boneyard doesn’t have to be just a safe resting place. Depending on who the signs can count among their fans (usually affluent donors), they also have a chance to be restored and displayed once more.

In all, 11 signs have been fully restored to working condition, and 10 of them are displayed in downtown Las Vegas, lighting up every night as part of the Neon Museum goal to literally illuminate the city’s history.

Glowing brightly along the avenues of downtown, the restored signs are a clean, easy way to get a taste of the giants that wait, just up the beanstalk and inside the Boneyard’s fences.

-- By Jamie Helmick

(Tours of the boneyard for groups of 10 or more are available by special appointment. Call (702) 387-NEON or go to http://www.neonmuseum.org/ to arrange for a tour.)