Letters from Neon: Scripts

Since their advent more than 100 years ago, neon signs have had a special relationship with script letterforms.  By their sinuous nature, neon tubes lend themselves to script.  Moore tube signs used script in the early 1900s; Claude's first neon sign in the U.S. reproduced Packard's trademark script logotype. 

Claude's first neon sign in the U.S. featured Packard's script logotype.  (American Sign Museum)

Steven Heller and Louis Fili's recent book Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design's Golden Age celebrates classic script letterforms and provides some insight on their evolution and significance. "In commercial contexts, a script would never be used for, say, a railway sign or other official posting," they write, "but it was common and appropriate for virtually any other type of signage . . . which demanded an ad hoc or handwritten appearance."

Specimen sheet for Gillies Gothic Bold, from American Type Founders, 1934, reproduced in Heller & Fili's Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design's Golden Age.

"Neon Script," from Alf Becker's 100 Alphabets, 1941. First published in Signs of the Times magazine, July 1933.

Script lettering evolved stylistically through the twentieth century with changing fashions.  Midcentury scripts lend their appeal to some of New York's best old neon signs.  They have a particular ability to evoke the spirit of their time, like the stylized emblems on automobiles of the same period, or the jaunty signature of any given mystery challenger signing in on the quiz show "What's My Line."

TOP: Midcentury scripts scoped out at the 2011 Rhinebeck Car Show (T.Rinaldi); BOTTOM: Bette Davis signing in on "What's My Line."

In some cases, as at Long Island City's landmark Pepsi-Cola spectacular, the sign faithfully reproduces a logotype designed previously by others.  But in most examples, the lettering is the original work of sign painters in a neon shop's layout department.

Some New York signs that play the contrast between script and block letters. (T.Rinaldi)

Very often, sign makers played the contrast between an elegant script and matter-of-fact block letters.  This practice seems to have peaked in the 1950s.  Typically, the signs use script for the owner's name, as though the sign was a personalized invitation.   "Before the advent of modern logo design, scripts gave the illusion that the business name was a signature," write Heller and Fili:  "They made the impersonal personal."  

Smith’s Bar & Grill, 701 8th Avenue, Manhattan / DaNite Neon Sign Co., 1954

Rainbow Café (removed), 3904 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn / c. 1955

Morscher’s Pork Store (removed), 5844 Catalpa Avenue, Queens / c. 1950

Kayton’s Specialty Shop, 723 East Tremont Avenue, Bronx / c. 1955*

Harold’s Prescriptions, 2272 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn / Super Neon Lights, Inc.,  c. 1946*

Antelis Pharmacy, 1502 Elm Avenue, Brooklyn / Silverescent Neon Sign Co. (attributed), c. 1955

Katz Drugs, 76 Graham Avenue, Brooklyn / Silverescent Neon Sign Co., c. 1955

Neil’s Coffee Shop, 961 Lexington Avenue, Manhattan / c. 1966*

Beekman Theatre (demolished), 1254 Second Avenue, Manhattan / 1952

Maimain’s Pharmacy, 821 Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn / Silverescent Neon Sign Co., c. 1951*

Joe Abbracciamento, 6296 Woodhaven Boulevard, Queens / New York Neon, c. 1949* (alterations by Artistic Neon, c. 1998)

Goldberger’s Pharmacy, 1200 First Avenue, Manhattan / c. 1960

Long Island Restaurant, 108 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn / c. 1951*

Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47th Street, Manhattan / c. 1960*

Egidio Pastry Shop, 622 East 187th Street, Bronx / c. 1967*

Eltingville Prescriptions, 3948 Richmond Avenue, Staten Island / Torrone Signs, c. 1961*

Uptown Wine Shop (formerly Julius Braun Liquors), 1361 Lexington Ave., Manhattan / 1952

Hinsch’s Confectionary, 8518 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn / c. 1948

Garry Jewlers, 474 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn / c. 1961

Bernard F. Dowd Funeral Home, 16520 Hillside Avenue, Queens / Grauer Sign Co., c. 1955 (alterations by Grauer Sign Co. 1982)

Sabatino Funeral Home, 321 Avenue U, Brooklyn / Super Neon Sign Co., c. 1959*

Carvel, 14901 14th Avenue, Queens / c. 1956*

Pepsi Cola, Long Island City, Queens / Artkraft Strauss Sign Co., 1938

Murray’s Sturgeon, 2429 Broadway / c. 1950

 Harold’s Prescriptions, 2272 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn / Super Neon Lights, Inc.,  c. 1946*

Holiday Motel, 2291 New England Thruway, Bronx / c. 1965*

 40 West 55th Liquors, 40 West 55th Street, Manhattan

Jay Dee Bakery (removed), 9892 Queens Boulevard, Queens / c. 1955*

John’s Restaurant, 302 East 12th Street, Manhattan / c. 1936*

Angelo’s of Mulberry Street, 146 Mulberry Street, Manhattan / c. 1955

Carnegie Delicatessen, 854 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan / Globe Neon Sign Corp., c. 1960

Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street., Manhattan / c. 1964

Radio City Music Hall, 1260 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan / United Signs Corp., 1932 (alterations, c. 1940)

 

From the film Dames (1934), by way of the Movie Title Stills Collection.

* = Probable date based on records at the New York City Department of Buildings.

Ancestry of Neon: The Moore Tube Light

There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.

                                                                                   Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, 1949

For most of the 20th century, historians have credited the neon sign to the French inventor Georges Claude.  In my own research, however, I came to see this as a gross over-simplification.  Daniel McFarlan Moore (1869-1936), an American inventor who essentially developed the concept of the neon sign as we know it, has been almost completely forgotten by history.  

The Prime of Daniel McFarlan Moore.  (New York Times, Feb. 5, 1896)

To ask "who invented the neon sign" is to pose a trick question.  Neon gas exists in the air we breathe: it was discovered, not invented.  Probably half of all so-called neon signs don't use neon at all (argon is typically used for colors other than red).  Neon and argon lights meanwhile are both varieties of "luminous tube" lamps, which likewise have no preeminent inventor.   

 

ABOVE: Illustration showing one of Moore's first tube signs.  (Scientific American, Feb. 2, 1896)

ABOVE: The "Moore Chapel," a small chapel mock-up illuminated by Moore tubes, was a main attraction at the Electrical Exhibition of 1898, held at Madison Square Garden.  Over the door, a Moore Tube sign welcomed visitors to the "Moore Vacuum Tube Chapel".  (Electrical Engineer, May 12, 1898)

Around the year 1895, Moore began making electric signs using luminous tubes bent into the form of letters or shapes.   Previously employed by Thomas Edison, Moore set up shop on his own in the early 1890s to develop a new kind of electric lamp that he thought would improve upon Edison's incandescent bulb, which Moore called "too small, too hot, and too red".  To do this, Moore looked to an alternate technology known as gas discharge illumination.  

 

ABOVE: Before-and-after rendering showing Moore tubes installed over a fashionable entryway. (Cassier's Magazine, September 1894)

ABOVE: Moore tubes at an entrance canopy on Fifth Avenue in New York.  (The Technical World, May 1905)

A gas discharge lamp is a sealed glass tube with electrodes at each end; the tube is filled with a gas that glows as it conducts electricity across the gap between the electrodes.   Experiments based on this idea date back to the 17th century.   The German physicist Heinrich Geissler made headway with gas discharge lamps in the 1850s, but Moore took the concept further in the 1890s, producing luminous tubes that were sold commercially for conventional lighting and for electric signs.  Neon gas had yet to be discovered, so Moore used carbon dioxide instead. 

 

ABOVE:  Moore tubes installed in the main entrance lobby at Madison Square Garden in New York, c. 1905. (Artificial Light: Its Influence upon Civilization, by Matthew Luckiesh, 1920)

Moore's idea turned out to be fatally ahead of its time.  He unveiled his tube lamp in 1896, just two years before the discovery of neon gas.  To keep them lit, Moore had to fit the tubes with a pump that replenished the gas inside.  Over the next decade, Moore struggled to make his lamp a viable competitor of the incandescent bulb.  Neon remained scarce and very expensive, so Moore experimented with other gases, such as helium and nitrogen.  Moore's goal was to make a lamp for general illumination: he would have seen neon's characteristic red glow as a significant handicap.

ABOVE: Plan drawing showing Moore tube installation at Bamberger's Department Store, Newark.  (Electrical Review, Aug. 18, 1906)

Georges Claude meanwhile literally found himself with neon gas he didn't know what to do with.  Claude's company, Air Liquide, supplied specialty gases for industrial use.  In seeking a commercial use for neon, Claude eventually decided to make an improved Moore tube using neon gas.  He sought to patent the idea in France in 1910, and in the United States the following year.  Neon's orange-red glow may not have been suited for general illumination, but, as Claude discovered, it fit the bill for electric signs.

 

ABOVE: Rendering of a proposed Moore tube installation for a church.  (Cassier's Magazine, September 1894) 

 

ABOVE: Interior of the Moore Chapel at the Electrical Exhibition of 1898.  (Electrical Engineer, May 12, 1898) 

At around the same time, the introduction of tungsten filaments suddenly improved the efficiency of incandescent bulbs, thus dampening the impetus for Moore's improved electric lamp.  Sufficiently discouraged, Moore reconciled with Edison in 1912:  he sold his patents to General Electric and took a position with the company's research labs, where his later work included pioneering developments toward the advent of television. 

ABOVE: Moore proposed tube lighting for streetcar interiors and for outdoor street lighting in New York. (Boston Daily Globe, August 1, 1897)

On the evening of June 14, 1936, Moore received a visit at his home in East Orange, New Jersey from a certain Jean Philip Gebhardt, a spurned inventor who apparently felt Moore had stolen one of his ideas.  "Oh, that's that nut from Brooklyn," Moore remarked, and went to bed.   Gebhardt returned the next morning and fatally shot Moore twice in the head (Gebhardt committed suicide two days later).  GE introduced the modern fluorescent lamp – a descendant of the Moore tube – in 1938.

 

ABOVE: Moore tubes to light "the drawing room of the future." (Cassier's Magazine, September, 1894)

ABOVE: "The drawing room of the future," perhaps not exactly what Moore had in mind - Club Babylon, Tony Montana's hangout in the 1983 film Scarface.  

Images of Moore tube signs are exceedingly difficult to find today, and not one physical example seems to have survived anywhere.  Signs were an afterthought for Moore's purposes, and he concentrated on conventional applications such as indoor and street lighting. 

 
ABOVE: Rendering for a Moore tube sconce.  (Cassier's Magazine, September 1894)

But the Moore tube's most successful application seems to have been for electric signs.  "I had the impression that it was good only for illuminated signs and relatively unimportant work," remarked electrical engineer Gano Dunn of the Moore Tube in 1907.  One later account recalls that Broadway was "flanked with a double row of this new type of electrical advertising" in the early 1900s. The credit for making luminous tube signs the 20th century icons they became goes to Claude, but it was Moore who developed the concept and first made it a commercial reality.

Please contact me if you know of any Moore signs that still exist, or any images of them.

FOR MORE, SEE:
• More about Moore at the Smithsonian.
• "The Moore Electric Light," in The Technical World, May 1905 (via Google Books)
• "The Light of the Future," in Cassier's Magazine, September 1894. (via Google Books)
• Complete bibliography for this story at this link.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS: 
• The great NYPD sign in Times Square has multiplied.
• I will give a brief lecture on neon sign conservation for the Association for Preservation Technology / Northeast Chapter's Historic Lighting symposium at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. Please join if you're in the neighborhood.
• New addition to the database at nyneon.org: an unknown travel bureau sign on Austin St. in Forest Hills, Queens (for real this time).

Point Pharamacy

Just before Christmas I ran across one of the most intriguing neon relics I've found in a long time, up in the Bronx.  While hustling down Hunts Point Avenue with some friends, en route to a Friday evening performance of "Los Nutcrackers: A Christmas Carajo" at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, I spotted an anomaly perched over a ramshackle storefront across the street.  "Do we have time for me to run over and grab a photo of something?" I asked my friends humbly.  "After the show!" they grumbled collectively, and we shuffled on.

Point Pharmacy, relic sign by night.  (T. Rinaldi)

Three hours and several coquitos later I dragged my cohorts over to the Point Pharmacy, which occupies the rounded corner of a taxpayer building at the intersection of Hunts Point and Garrison Avenues.  Behold, the weatherbeaten ruin of one of New York's oldest surviving neon signs.  The neon tubes are gone, and the whole thing has been slathered in a coat of ill fitting blue paint.  Ghosts of its original lettering peek out from behind a modern sign panel installed over the old sign faces.

Point Pharmacy, relic sign by day. (T. Rinaldi)
 

Ruins have fascinated me for as long as I can remember (I co-authored a book on them some years ago).  Some kinds of structures make better ruins than others.  Neon signs, I have found, often make wonderful ruins.  To wit: Point Pharmacy.  Of course it would be nice to see the sign come alight, and its future would look a lot better had it been consistently maintained over the years.  But its neglected state testifies for all the years it has been here, all the changes it has seen over eight decades.  For those of us who admire it, the sign's weathered aesthetic lets us feel that we have discovered something, found some beauty that is lost on most people.

Symmetrical, stylized silhouette, at Point Pharmacy.  (T. Rinaldi)

Despite its decrepitude, this sign is one of the better examples of its period in New York today.  Its symmetrical, stylized silhouette is a hallmark of electric signs made through the mid-1930s.  Only a handful of others survive in the city (see Nathan's Famous, Lascoff Drugs, Rudy's Bar, and Casa Oliveira Liquors).  The sheet metal along the sides of the sign has deteriorated, but the sign faces, likely of porcelain enameled steel, have held up well.

Hunts Point Drug Co., c. 1940. High resolution versions of the city's 1940 tax photos can be purchased from the Municipal Archives at this link.  (Municipal Archives)

A quick search of records at New York's Department of Buildings (DOB) yields no clear installation date for this lovely lady.  Based on its style I suspect it showed up here around 1935; it is present and accounted for in the city's tax photo, taken c. 1940.  The microfilm is fuzzy, but the photo shows that this corner drug store has been here for at least 70 years. The original copy (lettering) appears to have read HUNTS POINT across the top, DRUGS down the center.

If I had a million dollar bill, I would call up the folks at the Point Pharmacy and ask if they'd let me have one of my new friends in the neon business give their great old sign the Statue of Liberty-quality restoration it deserves.  Those old sign faces could be cleaned and mounted to a new internal steel armature if needed, with new sheet metal around the edges, and, of course, new neon tubes (I'd go for red letters with a blue border, like the old Nathan's sign).  It's fantasy, I know, but - there's always next Christmas.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:
• Check out Kirsten's spectacular Project Neon montage in the NYT

Lights Out 2011: Signs We Lost This Year

They get harder and harder to find each year, these old neon signs of New York.  Their disappearance is what prompted me to undertake this project five years ago.  Here's a look at some we lost in 2011.  (I have included a few that disappeared in the latter months of 2010.)

About 50 of the signs I've photographed for this project have disappeared since September 2006.  More vanished in the same period before I could get to them.  In the coming weeks I hope to add a complete gallery of "los desaparecidos" over at nyneon.org.  I'll mark that occasion with a post here as well.  Meantime, enjoy these photos of this year's casualties.  In most cases, photos are all that's left.

 

Faber's Arcade, 1230 Surf Ave., Coney Island, Brooklyn

Silverescent Neon Sign Co., c. 1948 

Lost courtesy of Thor Equities along with the historic Henderson Music Hall over the winter of 2010-2011. (Neon tubes that outlined the letters vanished years ago.)

Surf Hotel, 1230 Surf Ave., Coney Island, Brooklyn

1997 (Prop for Spike Lee's "He Got Game")

Lost courtesy of Thor Equities along with the historic Henderson Music Hall over the winter of 2010-2011.  Please tell me this found a good home. (Thanks to Amusing the Zillion for origins of this sign.)

696 Gourmet Deli, 696 Third Ave., Manhattan

c. 1965

Hadn't worked in years.  Tubes removed and sheet metal apparently covered over with new sign faces.

Morscher's Pork Store, 5844 Catalpa Ave., Ridgewood, Queens

c. 1950 

Replaced with a new sign (LED?) that more or less imitates the original, but without the panache of its veteran predecessor. 

Jade Mountain Restaurant, 197 Second Ave., Manhattan

1954 (raceway sign); Laster Neon Engineering Co., 1960 (projecting)

The restaurant closed down back in 2006, but the signs hung in there until this past summer, when they finally vanished amid many a hue and cry. 

Tout Va Bien Restaurant, 311 West 51st St., Manhattan

Midtown Neon, c. 1955 

Replaced with a new sign for this old restaurant sometime around Thanksgiving 2011.  The restaurant, fortunately, is alive and well.

McSwiggan's Bar, 393 Second Ave., Manhattan

1956

Taken down for repair or replacement, fate yet to be determined. DOB records indicate this went up along with a long-vanished fascia sign for an establishment known as Mullin & Swain's in 1956. 

Mayfair Chemists, 21 Seventh Ave., Manhattan

c. 1965

Old independent drug store closed some years ago.  Sign finally disappeared with expansion of neighboring Duane Reade this past fall.

Milford Plaza Hotel, 700 Eighth Ave., Manhattan (roof sign)

Artkraft Strauss Sign Corp., 1958

Taken down around October, 2011, amid reports a new sign is in the works.

R.H. Macy Co., 441 Seventh Ave., Manhattan (Seventh Ave. marquee signs)

c. 1932

DOB records suggest a very early installation date for this pair of emerald gems, which disappeared around Thanksgiving 2010.  A new pair neon signs with Macy's current logo appeared in their place.

Rainbow Cafe Restaurant, 3904 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn

c. 1955

Restaurant closed down a few years ago, signs remained until being taken down this past summer.  Reportedly put into storage for possible restoration.

Alex Liquor Store, 1598 St. Nicholas Ave., Manhattan

c. 1960

Felled for an LED replacement sign in November.  Original now in a private collection.

Fedora Restaurant, 239 West Fourth St., Manhattan

c. 1946

Vanished around New Year's 2010-11 to make way for a facsimile amid a somewhat controversial retooling of the restaurant within. 

AND THE ONES TO WATCH IN 2012:

Rocco Restaurant, 181 Thompson St., Manhattan
1934
One of the oldest neon signs in New York, poised to disappear when the restaurant packs up on January 2, 2012, after an 89 year run.

R.H. Macy Co., 441 Seventh Ave., Manhattan (fascia signs at corner of 34th & Seventh)
c. 1948

A pair of reverse channel beauties at Macy's southwesterly corner.  Will these survive Macy's impending renovation?

Milford Plaza Hotel, 700 Eighth Ave., Manhattan (vertical signs)
c. 1980 

The signs have been dimmed for the past few months as the hotel undergoes a major renovation. Hotel to rebrand itself simply "The Milford." Maybe they'll just lop off the PLAZA from the signs?

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)