Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Signs of old times

The gold-and-green sign promised "air-conditioning," "TV" and a "vacancy" to weary travelers arriving on lower Fremont Street during the post-war heyday of the auto courts. Today the tattered and rusted Lucky Motel sign rests atop a trailer at Casino Lighting & Sign company, awaiting restoration.

Miles from its original home, the sign is a survivor of a war on the city's past, which some argue is being lost to development and poor preservation efforts.

Its neon sputtered out in the late 1970s. Covered in dirt and filled with bird feathers, it was falling from its perch above the motel's dry pool. The owner had been cited twice for safety concerns, and the manager said renovation costs were just too high. But Steve Wyrick, a magician who collects old Las Vegas neon, rescued the sign.

Even though Mayor Oscar Goodman says, "Neon signs are to us what jazz is to New Orleans," not all old signs are so lucky.

"We do lose them," says Dorothy Wright of the Neon Museum. "We've lost far more than we'd like to, and their heritage value is priceless. These signs tell an important story about our history."

What many are calling lower Fremont Street begins a few blocks east of Las Vegas Boulevard and extends to Boulder Highway. It never had the razzle-dazzle of Glitter Gulch or the titillation of the more glamorous celebrity-courting Strip. It was a two-mile stretch of mom-and-pop auto courts. Popularized after World War II, those unique motels and signs don't exist anymore, says Lynn Zook, visual historian with Classic Las Vegas Archive, who still remembers the slogan: "See the USA in your Chevrolet: America is asking you to call."

The street's elaborate signs - designed to draw the eyes of passing motorists - are seen as prime examples of the Googie design by architects and historians. The neglected signs speckle the empty lots and cheap rentals, and still draw tourists to an area filled with the homeless, prostitutes and drug dealers.

"We get at least 20 people a week taking pictures. It's a part of the history of Fremont Street," says Kelly Freeman, manager of the Sky Ranch Motel, who says the owner has had requests from buyers eyeing the sign but doesn't want to sell.

Saving the past can be problematic for a city that ushers in the future with bulldozers and implosions. Even those who want to save the old signs can't agree on how to do it.

The Neon Museum, which has saved more than 100 of the artfully designed signs, wants to remove and restore them. But the nonprofit has a limited budget. It recently created a Living Museum Program, asking motel owners to donate the signs to the museum when they are no longer needed.

Alan Hess, architecture critic and author of "Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture," would like to see the signs restored and remain in their original area with their renovated buildings - allowing tourists to see them in the urban context and not in a museum. That would seem to fit with those who point to the economic success of the retro boutique motels in Palm Springs, Calif., and to the research by a group of University of Pennsylvania students, who studied the area several years ago.

"You've got to change the way people see the area," says Susan Nigra Snyder of Civic Visions, who accompanied the students from Pennsylvania. "There is a lot to love about the patina of those buildings."

But, she warns, "You can't just keep something because you love it. You have to transform it."

Because Las Vegas has no historic-sign ordinance, property owners can do as they please. That's evident at the trio of Alicia motels where the signs were sloppily repainted with the motels' new name, altering their historic value.

Hess believes the city should offer tax breaks and create sign ordinances.

"That part of Fremont Street gives us a glimpse of what the Strip was like in its heyday, in the '50s and '60s," he says. "It's legitimate history. Those signs and that part of Fremont Street is a historic neighborhood; just like San Francisco has a historic neighborhood of Victorian houses."

There is concern that some of the more treasured signs will end up in the back yards of local collectors, such as Wyrick and Lonnie Hammargren.

"We can't get every sign, but our goal is to entice business owners to make sure they end up in a public collection," says Steve Evans, spokesman for the Neon Museum. "We're trying to beat some of those private collectors to the punch."

Zook says she'd like to see the signs donated to the museum: "The biggest problem with them being restored and remaining in the same place is that all these little motels sit on land. What's valuable in Las Vegas is the land."

Mayor Goodman says he'd like to see the signs "kept for posterity." But he also says lower Fremont could be tied in with the Fremont East Entertainment District, which is already in progress: "Inevitably that's going to be the next sector of redevelopment. That's the next hot spot."

The city offers a Commercial Visual Improvement Program, which offers up to $50,000 in rebates for improvements to buildings and signs in redevelopment areas, including lower Fremont.

Owner Rakesh Patel has spent $8,000 of his own money to restore the Ferguson Motel's towering blue-and-yellow sign at 1028 E. Fremont St. The sign is topped by a flashing circle of lights and bordered with shimmering bulbs. The sign has been featured in photo books and a Volkswagen commercial.

"I was just going to go with a regular sign because it burns a lot of electricity. But it's worth it," says Patel, whose family bought the motel in 1999. "It looks good. When you make a left on Fremont Street, that's the first sign you see. People come because of the sign. Somebody is always out there taking pictures."

Patel, who attended Las Vegas High School, says he's thinking about making postcards of the sign. A framed color photograph of the motel in the 1960s hangs on the wall by the registration desk. Patel holds two postcards of the motel, one from the 1950s and one from the 1960s. In addition to the sign, he says, his family has spent $100,000 on other improvements.

"That's why we're busy. You have to spend money to make money," he says, wishing aloud that more owners would fix up their motels. "More people would come downtown."

But just fixing the signs can be too expensive for some, says designer Brian Lemming. Owners can spend $10,000 to $15,000 on sign restoration.

"It's just a matter of economics. It costs so much to restore them," he says. "Once they're down and trashed, they're down and trashed."

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