You're standing in the middle of the Neon Museum Boneyard. It’s a very interesting place right in the heart of downtown Las Vegas. The Boneyard actually existed because it was the repository for young electric sign company whenever they took down an old sign this is where they deposit it.
So they put it here so it died and then about 20 years ago some visionary said, “Hey, you know what we really are to preserve this signs and make them available for the people to see because they truly reflect the history of Las Vegas. Las Vegas is known for blowing up its building reinventing itself. In many cases this size are all that’s left of the historic places that made Las Vegas what it is today beyond the fact that that they’re really aesthetically stunning an architectural really wonderful so let’s take a scroll.
Behind me we have the wonderful Moulin Rouge sign. The Moulin Rouge is a really historic building for Las Vegas and what’s very interesting is the sign was moved here just about a month ago and by a strange coincidence, The Moulin Rouge that was left of it burn to the ground, so this is all that is left of this wonderful historic building. The designer of the sign was a woman name Betty Willis who was one of the in-house designers for young electric sign company.
You might know her because she’s the woman who designed the famous welcome to Las Vegas sign. The Moulin Rouge sign was her absolute favorite. She poured her heart and soul into it and when you saw it lit up with the wonderful pink neon glow it was a truly amazing sign.
Surrounding me is the reminiscence of the old Stardust sign. This sign dates back to the 1970s. It replaced an earlier sign that was about the same scale. I love this sign for a couple of reasons. One, when you're looking at these signs on the strip you don’t realize how massive they are because they’re designed to be look at from street level and from a distance and I think that’s what fascinate people that when mean you get up close to this they’re absolutely huge.
The other thing that I like about this sign is that it really represents what sign each did for a lot of properties. They hid them. In back of the Stardust hotel or the sign was simply four rows of motel buildings. They needed something to hide it because it really didn’t look very good so they build a 300 yard long sign to be the facade and then created a false front that actually hid what the property look like in there.
You know this is a really small sign and to some it doesn’t really look significant but it is one of my favorite sign. First of all, this sign dates back to the 1930’s and it really represents that in the Neon Boneyard there are signs that represent every decade.
One of the great things about Neon in Las Vegas is that it wasn’t just for hotel and casino use. We have so many wonderful artists and designers who did these signs that other business has took advantage of them also. One of my favorite is the Lucky Duck which was the sign foot. The Lucky Duck use car lots. So how many car lots around the country can have a sign that’s this beautiful, this sort of an aide sitting on top of the used car lot that’s Vegas baby.
Another example of how massive these signs are it is so massive the skull from the original Treasure Island sign dating back to about the mid 1980s from GoogleEarth.com that satellite you can actually zoom down and see the face of this skull looking right back at you. It’s pretty scary.
This is a sign that is just really reminiscent of the era of the 1940’s, the Old Golden Nugget. It’s fascinating for a variety of reasons not just because of the design and because of the color but also this was one of the beginning instances where neon signs actually became part of the architecture of the building. Robert Venturi wrote a seminal book called “Learning from Las Vegas” on how the signage of Las Vegas was really part of the architectural design. The Golden Nugget was a huge blazing of color and the blazing of light in downtown Las Vegas.
I can remember you know we would cruise down Fremont Street back in the 1960’s and 1970’s and you didn’t need to have the lights of the car on because all of the neon surrounding you just lit the street up so brilliantly.
You know neon has a fascinating history. It got started in the late 1800s and neon was a really scientific achievement. But I realize how different gases reflected different colors when electrical charges went through them. But no place in the world is anybody celebrated neon the way Las Vegas has and that’s why the Boneyard really stands out as an iconic museum of an incredible history of design, architecture, color and art.
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