Flash Dancers

Some weeks ago, while stealing back toward the 8th Avenue subway from my farewell visit to the now-vanished Famous Oyster Bar, I happened upon another neon casualty in the streets above Times Square.  Near the corner of Broadway and 52nd Street, FlashDancers, that veritable institution of bread-n-butter New York sleaze, has gone LED.  

This doesn't exactly tell us anything we don't already know.  FlashDancer's old neon was pretty mundane – not even a pale ghostly echo of the Pussycat Theatre, an extravaganza of neon smut that once stood just down the street.  Yet if the new sign's icecold LED glare and ultraboring Arial letterforms are any indication of the state of neon or sleaze in New York today . . . Heaven help us.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS: 

• Stay tuned for an announcement on my next New York neon walking tour!
• New York neon admiration from the Ephemeral New York Blog.
• A new project to document San Francisco's enviable assemblage of vintage neon.
• Similarly SanFran: a SF neon scavenger hunt.
• And still more Bay Area neon, courtesy of Debra Jane.
• From Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, a reminder that the Subway Inn is on borrowed time.  Gather ye cheap beers while ye may.
• From Project Neon, a lovely homage to the newly-relit Long Island Restaurant neon in Brooklyn.
• Like it or not: North Jersey's great Marcal factory sign has been reborn, with LEDs.
• Shorpy brings us this historic detail view of a rare opalescent-neon hybrid sign.