Neon illuminates Anaheim's past
Colorful signage from a previous era gets new life at museum
Neon lights shining in the dark of night were once a beacon for weary travelers, but then bigger, more modern hotels became more popular than the roadside motels of Anaheim's past.
But as the Silver Moon Motel, the Sandman Motel, the Americana Motel were torn down for new developments, their neon signs were tucked away in a city yard — left to gather dust.
Until they were recently wrapped up and delivered to a warehouse belonging to the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, where they will join other relics of Southern California's lighted past.
But they won't be gathering dust. Soon the warehouse, in Pomona, will become a second exhibition space for the museum, opening to the public in 2023, said Corrie Siegel, executive director of the museum, which has been curating and collecting neon art for more than three decades.
Before learning of the museum's work preserving neon signs, Anaheim officials had relegated the relics to storage because they seemed to have “outlived their usefulness,” city spokesman Mike Lyster said. The city lacked the funding to bring the signs back to their former glory, so they just sat there, some for 20 years.
The museum folks, who had assumed the roadside signs were long gone, offered a space and the knowhow for the pieces to shine bright for the public again, he said.
“For a moment it was kind of like the holy grail,” Siegel said of the discovery the signs had been set aside. Another sign, from the former Five Points Liquor Market near Santa Ana, had also been saved and has been sent to the warehouse.
The signs represent a typical American story of economic decline throughout the late 20th century, she said, noting that neon was the “height of technology and class” in the 1920s.
When these motels were in their heyday, Lyster said, tourists would drive down Beach Boulevard, the main route to the ocean before freeways, witnessing the “proliferation of midcentury neon.”
By the 1980s and 1990s, fewer tourists were interested in these
lodgings, and the smaller motels had to “resort to whatever they had to” in supporting themselves, Lyster said of their transition to pseudo-housing. As they became homes of last resort for many, the city also saw an increase in crime and drug activity that it is now trying to address with redevelopment efforts along Beach Boulevard.
And, Siegel sees an opportunity to usher in a “resurgence” of neon art with the museum's public opening of its warehouse in Pomona.
The museum holds nearly 200 neon relics in its collection — already on display is the iconic sign from Anaheim's now-shuttered La Palma Chicken Pie Shop — made possible several years ago by funds from an anonymous donor.
Also glowing in its collection are the green Monty's sign from Monty's Steakhouse in Pasadena; a seal bouncing a ball on its nose from the Seal Beach Hotel, once in that Orange County city; a Van de Kamp's Bakery neon windmill; and the Grauman's Chinese Theatre dragon.
Siegel said she hopes the decision to use the warehouse as a public space will allow the display of some cool signs that have been too large for the museum's Glendale galleries.
The Museum of Neon Art was founded in 1981 by two artists, including Richard Jenkins, who had starting collecting neon signs while still in high school.
“There was also a community behind them that was recognizing that these cultural treasures in our landscape were being removed and treated as trash by society,” Siegel said.
By the 1980s, neon was becoming more commonplace, she said, and it was being associated more with the nightlife of Las Vegas and “moral decline” than Main Street America.
“They were rescuing signs before they could be sent to the scrap yard, and talking to mom-and-pop businesses, urging them to donate the signs to them rather than throw them away,” Siegel said.
Today, the museum offers several exhibitions on neon as an art medium and its place in local history and culture.
“There are small little stories about the people behind some of our signs,” she said. “It also speaks to how each visitor to our museum has a story, and each person that passes by a neon sign has a unique and individual perspective.”
The museum also hosts doubledecker bus tours, taking visitors out into the Los Angeles area to look at working neon. They are “one part stand-up comedy and one part cultural history,” Siegel said.
“These tours are like these love letters to an ever-changing Los Angeles,” she said, noting that on almost every tour, she hears about a new art site that has popped up.
Neon artists also share the experience of bending and creating with the colorful glass tubing in one-day and weekly classes hosted at the museum, with more classes planned at the warehouse.
Siegel said she sees the warehouse as a continuation of the museum's legacy.
“It's just now that a lot of the cities are realizing they lost something when they took these signs away,” she said. “The fact that the city of Anaheim found a place to give these signs to is a remarkable story of city government doing what's right for preservation.”