"the Canvas Is the Night" Once a Visual Vagrant, Neon Has a Stylish New Glow

By J.D. Reed

Hot pink flowers illuminate the De Luxe Antique and Contemporary. A few blocks away, a ruby red couple sizzles in a clothing-store window. And across the street, Rocket Video glows brightly. This is Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and so striking are the electric patterns stitched across the night that passing cars slow down for a better view. The attraction? Nifty new neon signs.

Little more than a decade ago, neon was considered a visual vagrant, synonymous with tacky retailing and seamy night life. Now it is going through an efflorescence. Boutiques and malls throughout the U.S. are aglow with it. In the hands of architects, sculptors and even film directors, it is being put to complex and dazzling new uses. "Neon can be cool and elegant," says Paul Barrend, showroom manager of a Chicago neon workshop called Light & Space Design, "or it can be wild and vibrant. It calls attention."

Increasingly, the attention is favorable. "The Magic of Neon," a photographic exhibit mounted by the Smithsonian Institution, has been touring the country for 21 months, and a book with the same title by the show's curator, Design Writer Michael Webb, has gone to a second printing. At the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, after a boardroom battle over its appropriateness, a pink neon street sign was installed in place of the museum's Plexiglas one. "After all," says Board President Helyn Goldenberg, "we are a contemporary institution."

The demand is so great that the number of neon workshops in the nation has risen from fewer than 500 ten years ago to more than 1,000 (although that is still below the pre-World War II total of 1,500). The upswing is more than fashionable nostalgia. "This is not a fad," says Jeff Friedman, president of Manhattan's Neon City, which has such clients as Bloomingdale's and Haagen-Dazs ice cream parlors. "It's becoming a necessity for business, especially storefronts." Most workshops cannot keep up with orders, and not only because their business is growing. The problem: finding enough skilled craftsmen. Neon cannot be mass-produced; each piece of tubing must be heated and then bent by hand. There are only a few hundred neon artisans left in the country, and their average age is 50. Now, however, a dozen schools have opened to train newcomers. Architects are turning to neon to ornament postmodern designs, especially by tracing structural shapes and highlighting details. Slender ribs of blue neon provide elegant illumination for the walkway of a building in New York City's financial district. Uptown, Steven Panzarino, a New York City architect, is using neon for elevator indicator lights, recessed into the walls of a lobby. Says he: "We use it to enhance colors or show off a corner. You can bend it to design your own light. It gives off a mystical, ethereal quality."

It also casts a new light on urban gentrification by baby boomers and yuppies. Long favored in discos and nightclubs, neon is now the fashionable accompaniment to monkfish and Moussy. A welter of tubes puts the zing in San Diego's Fat City restaurant, highlighting 1950s artifacts for the young crowd. At Ichabod's, a trendy West Side Manhattan eatery that opened in March, the visual draw is an imposing Ionic column swathed in blue neon. "Neon is big with the more hip," says Chicago Interior Designer Laura L. Pedian, who did the Wells Street Journal, a local restaurant, in restful blue and gold. "It's part of what's happening today."

The current boom in neon brings its history full circle. Although the process of passing an electric charge through a gas such as neon or argon inside a sealed glass tube had been known for some time, it became commercially viable in 1910, when a French inventor named Georges Claude developed a long-life electrode. One early practical application: a giant white Cinzano sign over the chimneys of Paris. After being introduced into the U.S. in 1923, neon flourished for nearly two decades, especially as an accent for fantasies: movie houses, cocktail lounges, casinos. In the 1950s, when television took visual advertising from rooftops to the living room, neon began blinking out. It was left to a few dedicated preservationists around the country to salvage classic signs. A San Diego group rescued endangered examples like a 6,000- sq.-ft. marquee from a local drive-in theater. "They are cultural icons," says Lili Lakich, founder of the 3 1/2-year-old Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles, where 33 vintage signs are currently displayed. "They're the new ruins."

Neon has become a museum item in another sense as well. Starting with pop art, sculptors have been exploring its expressive possibilities. The artist who calls herself Chryssa has used neon in major pieces since the 1960s. Last year Artist Stephen Antonakos created two monumental 96-ft. by 12-ft. abstract neon walls of apple green, red-orange, pink and blues inside the Tacoma Dome, a sports arena. Artist Joe Augusta, who is also a tube bender, shapes masklike faces like Elvis Machine in startling colors, and Los Angeles Artist Eric Zimmerman made a playful neon birthday cake for the city's 1981 bicentennial. "Neon is the strongest, most direct form of illustration," argued Artist Larry Rivers in Rudi Stern's 1979 book Let There Be Neon. "And the canvas is the night."

Neon has also been employed on Broadway (in Chicago, Sophisticated Ladies) to evoke bygone eras and in films to fulfill the future. In the age of laser beams and computer-generated graphics, Neon Artist Larry Albright simulated intergalactic weaponry and UFOs for Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Ironically, the U.S. may have lost its standing as the world's prime outdoor neon user. That honor may now go to Japan, for elaborateness if not footage. Stern, the U.S.'s foremost neon historian and owner of Let There Be Neon, a Manhattan studio that designs for clients such as CBS and Sony, has seen international interest change even America's use of the form. Says he: "Times Square today is there for the Japanese chairman of the board who looks up from his limousine and feels that his product has arrived in the U.S. market."

In Las Vegas, whose towering, grandiose signs Writer Tom Wolfe once characterized as "Boomerang Modern" and "Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral," neon has not faded. The skyline remains an electric testimony to a raw and rambunctious American spirit. With its arrival elsewhere in so many shops and galleries and trendy facades, neon, which after all is the Greek word for new, seems to have found a means of staying that way. The medium has learned to bend with changing tastes.

With reporting by Meg Grant/Los Angeles and Laura Lopez/ New York with other bureaus