San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
LAS VEGAS
From historic neon to epic video
Ever since El Rancho Vegas opened in 1941 as the Strip’s first casino — topped by a windmill with neonlighted blades — “The casinos have always tried to use the latest illumination technology,” said gaming historian and author Dave Schwartz. “That was neon at one point. Then they started using video screens.
“The gradual move to LED technology has unfolded over many years, along with the arrival of increasingly flamboyant architecture,” said Schwartz, who directed the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research until a recent promotion to an associate vice provost position.
For Joel Snyder, an associate professor at UNLV who specializes in cognitive neuroscience, sensation and perception, the city’s everbrighter lights are a logical convergence of psychology and capitalism.
“First, we are very visual creatures, and we pay a lot of attention to patterns that are bright but also those that interest us for motivational and aesthetic reasons,“Snyder said in an email.
“We can effortlessly remember thousands of pictures that we were exposed to in a single setting and recognize almost all of them the next day. But we are much less good at doing that for sound.“
You’ll still find a handful of old-school neon signs in action, including the iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign (posted in 1959), which Roadsideamerica.com calls “a riot of fonts, bulbs and neon.”
Such old-school signage is rarely sighted in the wild these days, said Derek Weis, the education and engagement manager at the Neon Museum.
“There are many downtown along Fremont Street, such as Vegas Vic at the Pioneer Club and the signage at Binion’s and El Cortez,” Weis said in an email. “Many of the newer restaurants and bars on East Fremont have used neon for their signs as well.”
On the Strip, besides the welcome sign, Weis said the most familiar neon holdouts include the flaming feathers on the Flamingo facade and “Lucky the Clown” at Circus Circus, whose signage these days includes neon, incandescent and LED elements.
Weis said the Strip’s lighting began to change dramatically in the 1990s, when many familiar old hotels were leveled “to make way for new resorts that used LED in their signs.“In other cases, businesses kept going but dropped their vintage neon signage in favor of a newer look. (The Peppermill restaurant and Palace Station casino, for instance, remain in business but removed their old signs in 2018.)
Nowadays, “Most of the signs for the larger properties on the Strip incorporate LED instead of neon,” Weiss said. “The transition away from neon is almost complete.”
And it is highly visible in the projects recently completed and the big one still in progress.
At Resorts World, the 88-acre, 3,500-room project under construction on the Strip across from the Wynn and Encore resorts, two towers will rise, said president Scott Sibella. The western one will feature an LED display screen of about 100,000 square feet and will have an LED video globe, 50 feet in diameter, inside. The eastern tower will feature another LED screen.
These kinds of LED displays, Sibella said, can be relatively expensive to install as a replacement for an existing neon, incandescent or fluorescent setup but can make great sense on a new build.
“If you go over to China, they’re on every building,” Sibella said. “And here we are, the first property opening in 11 years (in Las Vegas) at this level, and we’re able to take advantage of that.”
Reynolds is a travel writer for the Los Angeles Times; christopher.reynolds@ latimes.com