Colony Record and Radio Center

The disappearance of Colony Record's old sign back in 2004 was one of those episodes that sewed the seeds of the project that became New York Neon.  The Colony survived and even installed some new neon, but the loss of its old sign made me realize that the time had come to start photographing the city's veteran neon before it was too late.  And now, as reported last month, the Colony's replacement sign too is set to vanish.

The Colony's current sign. (T. Rinaldi)  

The old sign whose loss I so ruefully bemoaned 8 years ago was not very old at all, as it turns out.  Though it looked like something out of the Robert Wagner era, it seems to have actually appeared in the early '70s, when the Colony moved into the famous Brill Building from its original location at 52nd and Broadway. The sign was memorable for its poodle skirt-clad neon maiden, leaping joyfully into the air, disk in hand, exclaiming I FOUND IT!  


The Colony's old sign, seen in an old photo formerly shown in its display window.

The disk girl was the successor not just to the Colony's original sign, but also to a series of extraordinary neon storefront displays that have anchored the northwest corner of 49th and Broadway for more than 80 years.  

The Colony's original sign, at 52nd and Broadway, made a brief appearance in John Schlesinger's 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. (Flickr.com / ChristianMontone, above; Midnight Cowboy, below)

The Brill Building opened in 1931, and by 1933 the corner now occupied by the Colony stood dressed in 2,500 feet of red and blue neon heralding impresario Nils T. Granlund's "Paradise Cabaret," a second floor nightclub that featured the "World's Most Beautiful Girls."  The Paradise didn't last long: by 1940 it had re-opened as a nightclub called the Hurricane, which itself made way for the exotic sounding Cafe Zanzibar by 1944. But the Zanzibar too proved not long for this corner: in 1949 it yielded to Bop City, a jazz club that lasted only a few years, despite featuring some notable headliners.

The Colony's spiritual ancestors: NTG's Paradise Cafe; Cafe Zanzibar, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt; Bop City, in a 1953 photo by Herman Leonard.  (Signs of the Times magazine, April 1933, used with permission, top; Alfred Eisenstaedt / Life Magazine, center; Herman Leonard / morrisonhotelgallery.com, bottom) 

The ground floor meanwhile housed Jack Amiel and Arnold Ruben's Turf Restaurant, which opened in 1940 and outlived one nightclub after the next until it finally closed in 1963.  The upstairs space eventually became home to a joint called the Avalon Ballroom (of which I could find no photos), but this too closed by 1966.  The northern part of the Brill Building meanwhile initially housed a Translux movie theater, which made way in 1937 for Jack Dempsey's "Broadway Bar and Cocktail Lounge."  Jack Dempsey's lasted clear up through 1974, about the time the Colony showed up. 


The Colony's sign swap, c. 2004, see in photo formerly displayed in its display windows. 

Today, the Colony's modest animated sign is the sole heir to a succession of legendary New York neon.  (An April 2011 post on the blog Lost City yielded some details on the old sign's disappearance - a zoning code issue, reportedly.)  What will follow it is anyone's guess.  A rather sinister rendering of the storefront's possible future appeared last week on the Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog (which also shared a New York Post report that the Brill Building's new owner helped usher along the Colony's demise by imposing a five-fold rent hike). Whatever comes here next will have some big neon shoes to fill.


The disk girl, re-born as a window display after the old disappeared in 2004, will soon flash her last. (T. Rinaldi) 

SEE ALSO:

• First word of Colony's Closing, at JVNY.

• JVNY's report on the mega rent hike.

• NYT piece on the end of the Colony.

• Lost City blog's post on the Colony's 2004 sign swap.

• Highly informative LPC designation report for the Brill Building.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• I have seen the neon book, and it is good!  She'll be in stores in about a month's time . . . 

Terminal Bar

A brief tribute this week to a sign I never saw:  the Terminal Bar, across Ninth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, was not the kind of place my parents brought me on our visits to New York when I was a kid.  And lo, by the time I was old enough to venture into such establishments on my own, it was but a memory.  One can get a sense for the good old days, though, in this really spectacular short film, part of a longer work by Stefan Nadelman, that I came across thanks to the great then-and-now study of the film "Taxi Driver" over at ScoutingNY (the Terminal Bar makes a brief cameo in Scorsese's 1976 film).  Mr. Nedelman's film uses photographs and reminiscences from his father Sheldon, who tended bar here for ten years.

The Terminal Bar and its neighbors, c. 1976, as depicted in "Taxi Driver". Having just about killed myself trying to get decent rainy night photos for the neon book, I have concluded that Scorsese must have opened some fire hydrants to pull this off.  ("Taxi Driver")

Together with its neighbors, the Exchange Bar and the Bus Stop Bar – both very congenial places, I'm sure – the Terminal Bar made a stirring sight in its day.  Imagine coming out of Port Authority to find THIS - New York's neon receiving line, there to greet you. 

Schnipper's Quality Kitchen, at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street - the site of the Terminal Bar today.  (T. Rinaldi)

The Terminal Bar and its neighbors are ancient history today, of course – Renzo Piano's gleaming New York Times building stands in their place.  Yet, almost improbably, some pretty good new neon has sprouted here on lower reaches of the new building.  Are these hearty seedlings of the signs that existed here before?  Or did someone just feel that this corner wouldn't look right without a good sign?  In a way, perhaps, a bit of both. 

(The New York Times building has some other great signs at street level – does anyone know who made them?)

Above: New signs on the lower reaches of the new New York Times building. (T. Rinaldi) 

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:
• The neon book has gone out to the printer!
• Did anyone watch Jeopardy last night (May 7, 2012)? The correct response to final Jeopardy was "What is NEON?" and yes, I am pleased to say I got it right.

Travler's Bar & Restaurant

You will pardon, I hope, the brevity of my posts this month.  It's the holiday season.  I'm busy, you're busy, so I will keep my remarks to the point.  Not to mention – it’s time to make final edits to the neon book!  I promise a more holiday-themed post next Christmas.

Being pressed for time, I stopped by the McDonald's near Penn Station the other day for some "fast" food.  Not really, but I couldn’t think of a decent segue.  Those familiar with this establishment may have noticed a change here lately: the restaurant reopened last month after a complete gut-renovation.   The work has brought this franchise up to date with the parent company's Apple store-inspired "new look."  "No more clown-red roofs," says USA Today of the nationwide overhaul masterminded by design consultants Lippincott. "If the new look proves to be a hit, it could redefine America's biggest restaurant chain and nudge competitors at all ends of the spectrum to find some way to respond."

McDonald's, old look versus new, at 490 Eighth Ave. (Google Street View, top; T. Rinaldi, below) 

What does this have to do with New York Neon?  Two things. First, it makes the point that neon signs are part of a continuum of commercial design that continues to evolve, embodied by different materials and technologies as time passes.  Second, it gives us an opportunity to admire the signs that held court here when 490 Eighth Avenue belonged to the Travler's Bar and Restaurant.  The signs vanished long before my time, but happily not before being immortalized in a splendid Wurts Bros. photograph preserved at the New York Public Library.  A quick internet search yields nothing on this business.  From the photo, we can tell that Travler's offered cocktails and seafood for voyagers passing in and out of Pennsylvania Station, a block away, and the bygone Greyhound Bus Terminal, then located just around the corner.

The Travler's Bar & Restaurant, December 10, 1946. The signs were installed in 1936 for the previous occupant, the Red Seal Restaurant, and later re-lettered for the Travler's.  DOB records suggest they survived until 1955.  McDonald's opened here by 1980. (NYPL / Wurts Bros.)

I have long noted with a certain pleasure how businesses in this part of town tended to name themselves for their proximity to Penn Station.  As the city declined in the 1960s and 70s and the old Penn Station yielded to that "monumental act of vandalism," these old places, with their names almost invariably articulated in aging neon signs, lent the area a uniquely gritty ambience.  The Penn Bar & Grill, the Railway Bar, the Penn Terminal Hotel, the Pennsylvania Liquor Shop, the Penn-Post Hotel, the possibly-doomed Hotel Pennsylvania . . . the Travler's Bar.

The Pennsylvania Liquor Shop, long gone, at 33rd and 7th, c. 1955. ("The Once & Future Pennsylvania Station")

The one and only Penn-Post Hotel (behind the bus), at 31st and 8th, Sept. 3, 1973.  The site is now a parking lot. (Joe Testagrose / bustalk.info)

They're all gone now, save for the Hotel Pennsylvania, a McKim Mead & White landmark that may or may not be poised for the wrecking ball.  Things to reflect on over a cappuccino and Fruit-n-Yogurt Parfait at 490 Eighth Avenue.

(NYPL)

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• Tout Va Bien's classic swing sign has vanished.
• New entries added to the sign inventory at nyneon.org:
   - Willie's Liquors
   - Point Pharmacy
   - DeVito Paints
• And makers identified for three more:
   - Bay Ridge Animal Hospital (Higger)
   - Catania's Shoe Store (Globe)
   - M&L Liquors (Super)

M is for Missing

The big M over the Milford Plaza is gone.  It appears to have come down sometime in the past few weeks.  With the old hotel undergoing a major renovation, I wondered what would become of its nice ensemble of old neon signs, which preside over 8th Avenue just west of Times Square.  In addition to the roof sign, part of which remains, the hotel also has a pair of large vertical signs, one on each side.

The late, great M, recently departed from the roof of the Milford Plaza. (T. Rinaldi)

A little history: as installed, the giant M stood not for "Milford", as one might suppose, but for "Manhattan" – Hotel Manhattan, to be exact.  It first appeared here in 1958, the work of none other than the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corp, which had installed the great Pepsi-Cola spectacular over the Bond Building at Times Square just two years earlier.   

One of the Milford’s two vertical signs, each 8 stories high. (T. Rinaldi)

The Manhattan's big M was the spiritual descendant of an earlier roof sign erected in the same spot when the building first opened as the Hotel Lincoln three decades earlier. Designed by architects Schwartz & Gross and built by Irwin S. Chanin (developer of the great Chanin Building, among many others), the Lincoln opened its doors on February 13, 1928, in commemoration of what would have been Honest Abe's 119th birthday (actually the day before).  Then-Governor Al Smith pressed a button to light the building’s original mast-like roof sign from the state capital in Albany during the opening ceremony.  

 The Lincoln’s original roof sign. (Signs of the Times, May 1932)

The Lincoln's original roof sign scored a brief cameo in the title sequence of the 1933 film adaptation of 42nd Street.  It was engineered by Sol Oberwager, a longtime fixture in the New York sign business who later became one of the city's most active sign-and-awning permit expediters, handling paperwork for a significant percentage of all illuminated signs erected throughout the city from the 1930s through the 1950s (including the Apollo Theater and Hotel New Yorker, among many others).   

The Lincoln’s original roof sign made a cameo in the 1933 film adaptation of 42nd Street.  The “H” at bottom belongs to the Hotel Times Square. (Frame enlargement, 42nd Street)

The original sign made way for the big M in 1958, when the Lincoln re-opened as the Hotel Manhattan.  Though it looked a little dull in recent years, the sign must have been a sight to behold when it debuted, clad in more than a mile of neon tubing that changed color in animated sequence.  A horizontal sign reading HOTEL MANHATTAN stood at its base.  "The Hotel Manhattan . . . has several beautiful signs to mark its spot," reported Signs of the Times magazine: "one on the roof has a 31-foot wide and 12-foot deep 'M' visible for 20 miles, [with] 6,500 feet of neon tubing in colors changing from white and gold to shades of blue." 

The Lincoln became the Manhattan in 1958. 

The roof sign survived the hotel's transformation into the Milford Plaza in 1980 (the new management simply removed the letters MANHATTAN from beneath the big M and left the rest).   At some point, the M was stripped of its neon and lit by floodlights shining up from below.  The old vertical signs on the north and south facades meanwhile were re-lettered to reflect the hotel's new name.  As neon hotel signs in New York grew increasingly scarce, the Milford remained one of the last places in the city where you could book a room with that iconic glow out your window.  

The Milford’s neon signs seen from Sardi’s on 45th Street in 2006.  (T. Rinaldi)

What comes next for the Milford's roof sign remains unclear.  Under new management (Highgate Holdings), the place is undergoing an extensive makeover, with slick new décor – some of it even incorporating a big capital "M" very much like the one that just came down from up top.  Does this hint at a new big M for the roof?  A restoration to the sign’s 1958 splendor, perhaps?  Or a replica of Sol Oberwager's 1928 original?  Word from the Milford's new management is that a revamped sign of one form or another is on its way, but the design is still in the works.  For now, it's wait and see.

REFERENCES:

• "Smith to Light 8^th Av. Sign."  New York Times, February 13, 1928.

• "Along Broadway."  Signs of the Times,  March, 1958.

• Special thanks to Ross Savedge for coming up with this week’s headline.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• Fedora Dorato, former proprietor of Fedora Restaurant on West 4th Street, has passed away (from Marty via JVNY).
• Rocco Restaurant, at 181 Thompson Street, poised to disappear after 89 years, leaving the future of one of New York’s earliest neon signs (installed 1934) in doubt.
• The lovely vertical sign at Alex Liquor Store in Washington Heights has gone to a private collector.
• Cambridge Liquor's classic vertical sign appears to be getting a facelift, tubes removed and sheet metal painted black.

Big MONY

The MONY weather beacon has been LED-ed.  I noticed it the other night, while running across Broadway in the rain, late for a dinner date.  The familiar old incandescent bulbs that told the time and temperature and zipped up the mast above are gone, together with the red neon glow in the star-shaped finial, all replaced with bright amber LEDs.  The change seems to have taken place over the summer.

MONY versus MONY, before and after. (T. Rinaldi)

Truth be told, the old weather beacon had begun to look a little sad of late.  Its codified weather signals hadn't worked in years, and the only thing you could count on seeing up there was a patchwork of burned out bulbs.  It's looking healthier now, if a bit sterile.

Before LED-ification, 4,200 lamps studded the Weather Star's 150-foot spire.  Keeping them lit proved a challenge.  (T. Rinaldi)

More properly known as the Mutual Life "Skymark" or "Weather Star", the installation first appeared in 1950, perched atop the new headquarters building of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York at Broadway and West 55th Street.  Conceived by famed Times Square sign man Douglas Leigh (1907-1999) and fabricated by the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corp., the Weather Star was produced by the same team responsible for virtually all of Times Square’s midcentury neon spectaculars, including the puffing Camel Cigarettes sign.  It was originally accompanied by a large neon sign reading MUTUAL LIFE in gold neon mounted to the parapet wall below the beacon.  The sign was later re-lettered "Mutual Of New York", then simply "MONY".  A re-hashed MONY sign appeared in 1998, which finally made way for the existing LED-powered "1740", installed in 2008 after the insurance company disappeared into an alphabet soup of mergers and acquisitions (MONY is now part of AXA S.A.).  

The Weather Star c. 1968, in a frame enlargement from "Midnight Cowboy."

The Weather Star meanwhile remained largely unchanged through the years (apart from some minor improvements made in 1965), outliving all of its Times Square cousins.  As originally programmed, the 4,200 bulbs on its 150-foot mast zipped up to indicate rising temperatures, down if the forecast called for cooler weather, and remained static if no change was predicted.  The star changed from green to orange to white to indicate fair or cloudy skies, rain or snow. 

MONY used the weatherbeacon as a corporate logotype in its advertising during the 1950s and 60s. (Life Magazine, June 24, 1957)

Similar weather beacons appeared in other cities (MONY has a cousin at the Mutual Life building in Syracuse; Wikipedia counts more than 70 around the world).  But the Weather Star was New York's own. "From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building," wrote Joan Didion in Goodbye to All That: "that pleased me obscurely."  Tommy James cited the display as the inspiration for the 1968 hit "Mony Mony": "It's almost as if God Himself had said, 'Here's the title.' I've always thought that if I had looked the other way, it might have been called 'Hotel Taft.'" The beacon had a bit part in John Schlesinger’s 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, backing up a questionable scrabble move by the hapless Joe Buck.  When MONY briefly dimmed the beacon in 1979 in an attempt to save an estimated $50,000 annually on its upkeep, a small outcry convinced the company to turn the lights back on. 

My gut reaction to the Weather Star's LED-ification came as a pang of nostalgic lament for the old incandescent bulbs.  It looks just a little too uniform, especially with the star in the same orangey LED hue as the rest of it.  But consider the alternative: the building is not Landmarked, and its owner – Vornado Realty Trust – could just as easily have taken the thing down altogether.  Much as I am invariably saddened by the loss of superannuated technology, it's nice to see new life breathed into the old girl.  Now if only they could bring back the beacon's animated, color-coded forecasting scheme so those of us without smartphones might once again get our weather on the fly . . .  

"Mony Mony" hit Number One on the UK Singles Chart in 1968.  (YouTube)

MONY Weather Star Fact Sheet

from Signs of the Times magazine, January 1951:

• Electrical Consumption: 170 kw

• Lamps: 4,200

• Neon Tubing: 3,500 feet

• Transformers: 85

• Wiring: 17,000 feet

• Height of Clock Numerals: 7 feet, 6 inches

• Combined Weight Mast & Base: 32.5 tons

• Diameter of Star Finial: 10 feet (from point to point)
• Height to top of Star Finial: 526 feet

• Estimated Range of Visibility: 5 miles

For more, see:

• Signs of the Times magazine, September 1950 (cover), January 1951 (pp. 41-42), and November 1965 (p. 100).
• Georgia Brittan, "MONY Star Extinguished." New York Magazine, March 12, 1979

• David Dunlap, “No More MONY in the Midtown Skyline.”  New York Times, February 8, 2008

 

American Neon

Sixteen stories over Broadway, the remnants of an old painted sign reading AMERICAN NEON are still faintly visible.  They cling to the side of a 21-story office tower at 989 Sixth Avenue, just above Herald Square, known as the Lefcourt Empire Building.  Handsome but rather non-descript, the Lefcourt Empire melds anonymously into the midtown skyline today.  But for a few years in the late 1920s, a giant neon beacon blazed out from its roof, making this one of the most prominent nocturnal landmarks in the city.

16 stories over Sixth Avenue, faint lettering still reads AMERICAN NEON. (T. Rinaldi)

 

The big neon beacon made its appearance here as an advertising ploy for the American Neon Light & Sign Corp., which organized in 1927. Since the first practical neon signs appeared in the United States in 1923, one company – Claude Neon – had sought to control the neon business by way of patent litigation.  By the late 1920s, however, Claude began to lose its grip on the industry.  American Neon was one of Claude’s first serious challengers.  
 

 American Neon lit the universe... but not for long.  (Signs of the Times, Sept. 1927)

The company’s backers included A.E. Lefcourt, a prominent real estate developer.  "All but forgotten today," says Wikipedia,  "in his lifetime Lefcourt was known as one of the city's most prolific developers of Art Deco buildings." Keying into the growing fascination with developments in aviation, Lefcourt offered American Neon the roof of the Lefcourt Empire for the construction of a neon "airport signal" intended guide aircraft towards New York from as far as 100 miles away.  To light the beacon, the company brought in Clarence Chamberlin – pilot of the second successful Transatlantic flight (completed in June 1927, just two weeks after Lindbergh) – who flipped the ceremonial switch. "Special provisions have been made for the flashing of any and all code signals on any specific occasion," reported Signs of the Times magazine in August 1928.

 
Lighting the neon beacon.  (Signs of the Times, Aug. 1928)

American Neon advertisements featuring the beacon.  (Signs of the Times, Nov. 1927 left; July 1928 right)

By appearances, American Neon could hardly have picked a better time to enter the neon business. The years 1927 and 1928 saw neon signs sweep the country in the way LED signs seem to be doing today.  But somehow, things went awry.  Sure enough, the company became embroiled in costly patent litigation – the so-called “neon war” of the late 1920s.  Then came Black Tuesday.  Claude’s crucial patents expired in 1932, but it was too late for American Neon, which declared bankruptcy in 1930.   

989 Sixth Avenue by daylight, Feb 5, 1929, showing the beacon at upper right.  (P.L. Sperr / NYPL)

In the years that followed, American Neon and everything it touched faded into obscurity.  Lefcourt’s real estate empire fell apart during the depression:  he died of a heart attack in 1932, just 55 years of age, leaving behind a small army of frustrated creditors.  While Lindbergh remained a household name for decades, Clarence Chamberlin wound up selling real estate in Connecticut, where he died in 1976.  And once the beacon light went dark, the Lefcourt Empire Building receded into the cityscape, as taller towers rose around it.  Satellite photos reveal no trace of the beacon on its roof today.  But the faded letters remain, a haunting reminder of headier days.  

The Lefcourt Empire today.  (T. Rinaldi)

(More background on American Neon can be found at the fantastic web site 14to42.net.)

Railway Bar

My apologies for the month of “radio silence” on this blog.  My energies have gone toward edits to the neon book, which is now back at the publisher for another go-around. 

I thought I’d break the silence with a little tribute to a sign I never got to see (at least I don't remember it): that of the Railway Bar, which stood on 8th Avenue just below Penn Station.  I came across this while surfing through the archive of NYC tax photos taken in 1980, housed at the Municipal Archives.  What can I say, love at first sight.  This looks like a place for people who knew how to have a good time.

Municipal Archives

The Railway Bar is long gone now – a Google search turns up almost nothing, nada, bupkis, zippo.  The only other trace I could find was in one of Matt Weber’s great photo-montages of New York neon from days past.  A liquor store occupies the space now (thankfully it’s not a Starbucks or an ATM depot, though that’s probably a matter of time). 

The former Railway Bar today.

The photos show that the sign had red tubes in stainless steel channel letters set against a backdrop of green porcelain enamel, with nice stainless steel stripe moldings to each side.  Records at the DOB suggest an installation date in 1947.
















Sign montage by Matt Weber, showing the Railway Bar at 2nd row center, just below Small's.  All but two of the signs pictured here have vanished.

There is still a nice amount of tenderloin grit on this stretch of 8th Avenue, which I enjoy any time I make the schlep between my apartment and Penn Station.   Some good neon survives here, too.  The Penn Bar & Grill on the corner of 31st and 8th made way for Brother Jimmy’s a number of years back, but the new place did a good turn and installed a decent neon sign in place of the old one.

The Blarney Stone and D'Aiuto Pastry Shop.

Just down the street, the 8th Avenue Blarney Stone still has a great sign, even if the bar inside looks nothing like it did in the old days.  And over across the street there’s still D’Aiuto, whose sign went up in the days when you could have grabbed a snack here and caught the Broadway Limited to Chicago in the late, great Pennsylvania Station.

Choo-choo and RIP, Railway Bar!  If anyone has any memories of this place, feel free to drop me a line.

Nice deco brickwork on the facade of the ex-Railway Bar.