Sign of the Times
Lysanne Currie explores a Vegas hidden gem – the museum dedicated to collecting and preserving its iconic neon signs
What springs most vividly to mind when you picture Las Vegas? Aside from the slot machines, shows and dancing girls, chances are it’s the neon hoardings, those luminous altars to mammon that spear the night like swishing lightsabres, that have really come to define this most over-the-top of American cities. From ‘Vegas Vic’ the iconic, electronic cowboy to the glittering array of outlandish logos decorating those lavish hotel-casinos up and down the strip, Vegas is truly the world’s other City of Lights.
But all those signs need to go somewhere at the end of their lives. And while you’ll find a glowing riot of colourful kitsch closer to home in London’s East End, at the outrageous God’s Own Junkyard, Vegas has its own repository too in the form of the appropriately named “Neon” – a graveyard and afterlife for those bombastic bulbs. It’s every bit as wonderful as you can imagine.
It was the Salt Lake-city based Young Electric Sign Company who in 1945 created Vegas’ first spectacular neon sign, a riot of incandescent bulbs for The Boulder Club. More followed during the ‘Golden Age of Neon’ as YESCO’s designers produced a flood of iconic displays the length and breadth of the strip, including signs for the Dunes, Sahara and Caesar’s Palace.
Many of YESCO’s signs can now be found here, at the Neon Museum. Set amid 2.25 acres on Las Vegas Boulevard and Bonanza, it’s located about a 20-minute drive from Meet the Leader’s stay at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino on the Vegas strip. Dedicated to “collecting, preserving, studying and exhibiting iconic Las Vegas signs for educational, history, arts and cultural enrichment” the museum was founded in 1996 and officially opened its doors to the general public in 2012. It’s a non-profit affair, but when the museum gets cash it mean it can light up another sign; at the moment only about 30 of them have been rewired, and restored to switch on again.
The first display that greets you (you can’t exactly miss it) is the famous Silver Slipper sign that once rotated atop the casino of the same name in Paradise, Nevada, from the 1950s. Local legend has that the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes once snapped up the casino and filled the slipper with concrete, because he thought the slipper’s toe, then facing the window of his Desert Inn penthouse, could conceal a photographer, who could take photos of him.
The volunteers who work the museum’s circuit (there are three main zones, including the ‘Neon Boneyard’, housing over 200 signs, some restored) are happy to scotch such myths, answer any questions, and give history lessons as you meander around an hour-long guided tour, checking out signs that date back to the 1930s, including Alice in Wonderland-style teapot sets, giant Martini glasses, magic lamps, ‘chapels of love’ and skulls, along with signs from legendary casinos past: the Stardust, the Sahara, and Golden Nugget. One weather-beaten Las Vegas native neatly summed up the story of Vegas for us with a well-practiced line: “The railroad built it, the dam saved it, and organised crime made it what it was today.”
Another volunteer told us about the amazing Betsy Willis, who designed Glitter Gulch’s most famous sign – ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ (which she called “my gift to the city”), and also the landmark sign for the Moulin Rouge, which you can see in the Boneyard. One of the few female neon designers from Vegas’s golden era (the Blue Angel Motel, Bow and Arrow Motel, and the Riviera pylon are also hers), she died in 2015 aged 91. Like her legacy, however, the Neon Museum ensures these amazing historical artefacts shine on.
Lysanne Currie visited the Neon Museum at the invitation of Virtuoso Travel and Swiss Tourism.