Was Rexall, Now Blockheads

Something about the Blockheads sign on Second Avenue and East 50th Street doesn't seem quite right.  It looks like an old sign.  But it also doesn't.  The sheet metal wrapping the sides of its distinctive silhouette looks like it's been around a while.  But the aluminum sign faces and the lettering are clearly not very old, nor has Blockheads (a local chain of Mexican restaurants) been around all that long (their web site dates the chain's inception to 1989).  So I never counted it in my survey of New York's old neon signs. Ex-Rex at 954 Second Ave. (T. Rinaldi)

Then I saw this:  a pizza joint sign in Mundelein, Illinois, surveyed by Debra Jane Seltzer this past August.  

Bill's Pizza and Fabulous Hot Dogs, in Mundelein, ILL.  (Debra Jane Seltzer)

This is actually, as Debra Jane immediately recognized, an ex-Rexall Drugs sign re-lettered for the pizza joint.   Aha!  Rexall affiliates hung signs of this standard design all over the country (Debra Jane has compiled a gallery – actually four galleries - of them here).  At least two of them have been recycled in this way. 

A Rexall sign in its original livery, at Stewart Drugs in Lexington, Tennessee. (Debra Jane Seltzer)

The question is:  was this Second Avenue storefront a Rexall before Blockheads came along?  Or did Blockheads just salvage this old sign from someplace else and hang it here?  The 1980s tax photos at the Municipal Archives web site are just plain too fuzzy to solve this mystery, though there does appear to be a sign of about the same size and shape in place here.  Do any east side old timers know the answer?

SPECIAL THANKS to Debra Jane Seltzer for lending the photos in this post. 

NEW YORK NEON IN THE NEWS: 

• Very nice coverage of New York Neon in Friday's (10/19/12) New York Times, in Eve Kahn's Antiques Column. IN OTHER NEON NEWS:  • Further down 2nd Ave, some neon and other signs in photographs by Jim and Karla Murray. • Via the JVNY and ATZ blogs – Coney’s old Playland building is finally being demolished together with the hulk of its old sign. • In Detroit, Tiger Stadium is gone but preservationists managed to save the sign, which has just been re-lit. (Thanks to Eve Kahn for the link.) UPCOMING NYNEON TALKS: • Nov. 19, 2012 at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation • Nov. 29, 2012 at the Skyscraper Museum • Jan. 24, 2013 at the 92nd Street Y TriBeCa

Hotel Neon: The Cavalier Hotel

In the lengthening late summer shadows of a hot August evening in 2006, the finely patinated sign of the Cavalier Hotel caught my eye.  I was en-route to the East River Water Taxi for some farewell photos of the grand quartet of smokestacks that stood over ConEd's Hudson Avenue power plant, three of which would vanish from the skyline later that year.  Plodding my way down East 34th Street toward the docks, I paused for two point-and-shoot photos of the Cavalier, then turned and headed for the waterfront.

The Cavalier Hotel, formerly at 200 East 34th Street, pictured in 2006. (T. Rinaldi)

The Hudson Avenue Power Station, pictured on the same day, with its Aquitania-like quartet of smokestacks, now reduced to one.  (T. Rinaldi)

The Internet has surprisingly little to say about the Cavalier, which seems to have opened as the 34th Street Hotel in 1901.  Walter Grutchfield compiled some details on the hotel's history back in 2003, shortly before it closed.  "It is still in operation," he wrote then, "but it is difficult to say to what extent it operates as a hotel in today's sense of the term."

200 East 34th Street in January 1939, seen through the shadows of the Third Avenue El. (NYPL)

Six years earlier, the Cavalier turned up in a short piece in the New York Times.  "21 Face Drug Charges in Midtown Hotel," read the headline.  The Cavalier, it seemed, had become a "stash house" for enthusiasts of such tasty treats as cocaine, crack, and heroin.  The story described one particularly irascible dealer who apparently plied his trade in the building's dim hallways:  "One night the man grew angry when a customer would not buy drugs and stabbed the customer and the customer's dog."  

200 East 34th Street today. (New York Budget Inn)

I went back to the Cavalier on a summer morning in 2009 to see if I couldn't get better photographs of its old neon sign.  Too late: it was already gone, together with the hotel's "flagrant illegal activity," and its dog-stabbing crackheads.  Today the former Cavalier Hotel is up and running again, as the evocatively named New York Budget Inn, a "newly refurbished budget-priced boutique hotel" that offers "the best price to stay in NYC that doesn't involve your buddy's futon."  Since it has no neon sign to beckon would-be guests, the New York Budget Inn has a suave, come-hither web site instead.  Like the sign, the web site's job is to draw in customers.  But unlike the sign, the hotel's internet presence leaves no physical trace on the streetscape.  It casts no red glow across the ceilings of the rooms within. 

THIS IS THE THIRD in a series of stories entitled "Hotel Neon," exploring the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. See also: 

• Hotel Neon, Part 2: Hotel Neon

• Hotel Neon, Part 1: The Chelsea Hotel

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• I am really enjoying the typeface for the 2012 London Olympics, and am fantacizing about seeing these letters rendered in neon.

• Have you been following Debra Jane's roadside blogging?

• Lascoff's sign is still hangin' in there as of July 31, 2012.

• By of JVNY, some old signs in Borough Park at the One More Folded Sunset Blog.

Tudor City

But for a decision of New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission, the Tudor City sign would be just a memory today, leaving 42nd Street's eastern terminus without one of its most visually engaging features.  Neon roof signs for apartment buildings were somewhat common in Los Angeles, but have always been rare in New York, the sign at Tudor City apparently being the only surviving example today.

Tudor City, with the East River beyond.  (T. Rinaldi)

 

Signs over the Ojai, Fontenoy and Los Altos buildings in Los Angeles.  Neon signs for apartment buildings were somewhat common in LA, as the examples pictured above attest, but never really caught on in New York. (T. Rinaldi)


Originally, the Tudor City sign was part of a matched set, which beamed west down 42nd Street from atop a pair of high-rise apartment buildings.  Fred French, Tudor City's developer, conceived of the complex as an almost semi-suburban enclave in the heart of the city, eventually including ten buildings in all.  French positioned the signs to catch the eye of weary commuters heading back to Grand Central and the suburbs after a day at the office or a night on the town, as if to say "if you lived here, you'd be home by now." 

Tudor City's original twin incandescent bulb signs, depicted in a period sketch published in the Edison Monthly. (Edison Monthly, December 1928)

The signs reared their heads in the late 1920s, perched on the rooftops of Prospect Tower to the north and Tudor Tower to the south (completed in 1927 and 1929, respectively).  Incandescent bulbs originally outlined their giant letters, but after about ten years, the management upgraded to neon, hiring Claude Neon Lights to retrofit the sign over the Prospect Tower on the north side of 42nd Street.  The other sign had already been removed, likely because the construction of the Woodstock Tower at 320 East 42nd Street blocked it from view.

Tudor City's neon conversion scored coverage in Signs of the Times magazine in 1939.  (Signs of the Times, June 1939, above; October 1939, below; used with permission)

The surviving sign hasn't come alight in decades, but a 1939 blurb in Signs of the Times magazine records that its tubes once glowed a shade of "old gold," which would have been more or less consistent with the off-white hue of the incandescent bulbs they replaced.  ("Old gold" was a relatively popular color for neon signs at the time; the great RCA sign atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza used the same shade.)  In 1995, Prospect Tower's co-op board filed for a permit to remove the sign, but was rebuffed by a unanimous vote of the Landmarks Commission, which had designated the entire Tudor City complex for protection in 1988.  Thus spared to survive into more "enlightened" times, perhaps one day that old gold glow might once again brighten the east end of 42nd Street.

Tudor City's neon ghost remains in place over 42nd Street.  (T. Rinaldi)

SEE ALSO:

• A November 1995 New York Times story by Christopher Gray on the co-op's failed attempt to have the sign removed.

• The Landmarks Commission's in-depth designation report for Tudor City, by way of the Neighborhood Preservation Center.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• New York Neon featured on last week's "The Debrief with David Ushery" on WNBC (Sunday, June 24, 2012)!
• From the Lost City blog, great news on salvation for the Sokol Brothers sign in Brooklyn.