SIGNS OF LIFE

Monday, Sept. 24, 2007 | 7:18 a.m.

In the 1980s Patrick Gaffey was heading the nonprofit Allied Arts Council when he got a call from an employee at the Sands hotel.

The Sands was taking down its original sign. Would Allied Arts want it?

"Why are you asking me?" Gaffey asked the caller. "We don't have any program to save it, no space to store it and no equipment to go get it."

The sign got trashed. Gaffey, whose father worked room service at the Sands during its heyday, felt terrible.

The idea of rescuing old Las Vegas signs was circulating in small groups. Suddenly it became predominant conversation.

It was time. Las Vegas was changing. Artistic and thematic hotel signs were being phased out, replaced by spectacular buildings.

So when the Preservation Association of Clark County suggested the Allied Arts Council collect the old signs, Gaffey, who had "residual guilt" over the Sands sign, agreed.

A dozen signs were rescued and temporarily stored at the wastewater treatment plant. In October 1997 the nonprofit Neon Museum was established.

Today the Boneyard, which includes signs donated from Young Electric Sign Co., is romanticized, glamorized and contemplated. The large and clunky signs star in movies, magazine shoots, music videos and art books, and are splashed all over Flickr , a photo-sharing Web site. The appeal is universal.

Although most people know something about the museum, they don't know much. It's a mystery. The Boneyard has spent most of its years sealed off from the public. Photographers, artists and writers have jumped the chain-link fence or made appointments to look at the goods. At Las Vegas Boulevard North and Washington Avenue, the Boneyard has avoided throngs of gawking tourists.

Its greatest little secret might be that behind this famous collection is a small grass-roots group running the entire operation. No full-time employees, no grant writers or marketing efforts. No executive director and no acquisition fund. The museum has received $3 million in grants, public funds and donations over the years, but it often flies so far under the publicity radar that every time it makes news through an acquisition or installment, ears perk and questions arise.

Naysayers ask where the money is going and quip that the museum will never open. Board members are aware of the chatter, but are too buried in fundraising and sudden acquisitions to give it much credence. Its time is coming, they say.

"Our silence in the community is not a sign of inactivity," says board member Patrick Duffy, who cites red tape and the process of large-scale acquisitions as slowing efforts to build a formal museum.

Today there is more movement than ever. Las Vegas is restoring and installing three Boneyard signs: the H from the Horseshoe, the slipper from the Silver Slipper and a palm tree from the Polynesian hotel. Board Chairwoman Nancy Deaner describes the scenario as " bread crumbs leading down to the museum."

Fifteen-dollar guided tours (Tuesday through Saturday) generate revenue, as do rentals for magazines and video shoots. "A large-scale fashion shoot could bring in as much as $7,000," says Melanie Coffee, operations manager of the museum.

Next month the museum continues its most ambitions project: rebuilding La Concha. The conch-shaped motel lobby, designed by architect Paul Revere Williams, was moved from the Strip to the Boneyard in December to serve as the museum's entry. State Historic Preservation money ($240,000) require s that it be completed by the end of this year.

Construction of the back of the building is slated for next summer. The museum has $1 million in the bank for the project. It needs $1.5 million more.

Duffy says the money will come. Major donors have included Rhodes Homes, which gave $60,000, and John Ritter, who gave $50,000.

La Concha's restoration is expected to revive interest in museum support. But with every step forward in the building effort, an acquisition sets it off track.

"All of the sudden, everything has to stop," Duffy says.

The Stardust sign is a good example. There were complications with the intellectual property agreement and a shortage of money. It took two weeks just to dismantle the sign and at the last minute the museum realized it didn't have enough money to remove it. Deaner and another board member, Dorothy Wright, recently joked about lashing themselves to its base. Pleas for more money were made to the Las Vegas Centennial Committee. Boyd Gaming, which donated the sign, gave an additional $100,000 to take it down and put it into the truck. The final moving cost came in at just under $200,000. Restoration costs are estimated at more than $1 million.

About a dozen signs have been restored. Even smaller signs can be costly. Restoring the Silver Slipper and the Horseshoe signs is expected to cost $100,000 each.

At least they have a home. The museum's first grant, $25,000, came from the Nevada Arts Council to restore the Hacienda Horse and Rider. But there was no place to put the sign, and it remained in storage for nine years. By then, it needed to be restored again. Architect Brad Friedmutter footed the bill.

"That was a real eye-opener," Deaner says.

The group has learned and is moving forward - even though it might seem backward, having gotten the signs before building the museum.

"We've just done it backward because we had to do it that way," Deaner says with a laugh. "We took the signs, but didn't know were we'd go with them, where we'd put them. It's not a normal museum project."

But, she says, the museum didn't want to turn down the chance to save the historic signs.

"Everybody wants to see the Boneyard. It's hugely, hugely popular because it's the history of Las Vegas. I think of those as my childhood icons. But in reality, they are the world's."