The Artkraft Files

No news is usually good news on this here New York Neon blog – my reports often have to do with some great old sign being pulled off a wall somewhere.  In fact, New York lost three lovely old neon signs in recent weeks.  But first, the good news: the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corp. papers are now available for researchers at the New York Public Library.

Original design drawings for the Howard Johnson's signs that held the corner of 46th and Broadway in Times Square from 1960 until about 1990, when they made way for replacement signs that finally vanished in 2006. (NYPL)

Artkraft Strauss was New York's preeminent maker of electric signs for most of the 20th century.  The company is known for having fabricated most of the blockbuster Times Square spectaculars erected between the 1930s and the 1990s.  But researchers will not find materials relating to Artkraft's Times Square mega-signs amongst the NYPL collection: the company sold these documents at auction in 2006 when it discontinued its sign fabrication and maintenance operations.

Correspondence from a HoJo staff architect dictating the color scheme for the Times Square signs. (NYPL)

Instead, the bulk of the files at the NYPL tell the story of Artkraft's more garden variety "on-premise" signs – theater marquees, roof signs for hotels and factories, and typical storefront signs.  In many ways, this body of work is more significant than the spectaculars, which are already well documented.

Before there was the Life Cafe, the Life Restaurant commissioned this design sketch for a sign that Artkraft may or may not have ever actually fabricated.  (NYPL)

The Artkraft Strauss papers at the NYPL offer representative examples of the what one might have found at typical sign shops in New York and elsewhere.  Better than any other resource I have found so far, these files tell the story of how the signs came to be.  All of the New York sign shops I've successfully contacted told me they discarded these materials long ago.  There are sketches and letters, formal design and shop drawings, maintenance contracts and photographs. 

Just in time for the neon book, these materials helped me solve a nice handful of little mysteries, for example:

YES!  The big Blumstein Department Store sign on 125th Street was the work of Artkraft Strauss, as I suspected.

Artkraft's sign for Blumstein Dept. Store sign lorded over 125th Street in Harlem from 1936 until it was covered over around 2008. (T. Rinaldi)

NO! The "Music Hall" copy on the Radio City marquees was not originally its present yellow, as implied by reports stating the sign was "restored"  to its original colors, but red, as I remember seeing it when I was a kid.

YES! Artkraft Strauss indeed made the enormous Silvercup Bakery sign in Long Island City, in 1961-62, and re-lettered part of the sign to its present Silvercup Studios configuration twenty years later.

Artkraft's original construction drawings for the Silvercup Bread sign in Long Island City (top), which survives today in slightly altered form (below). (NYPL; T. Rinaldi)

YES! The Loews Post Road Theater sign in the Bronx was among many Loews theater signs made by Artkraft throughout the New York area.

Original drawings for the Loew's Post Road Theatre signs, installed in 1939.  The vertical sign was later re-lettered when Loew's sold the theater, but remains in place today. (NYPL; T. Rinaldi)

YES! Artkraft also made the big Domino Sugar sign on the Williamsburg waterfront.

Drawings for Williamsburg's Domino Sugar spectacular (above) and the sign as it appears today (bottom).  This sign replaced an earlier display which stood atop the historic refinery building next door (at left in the photo).  (NYPL; T. Rinaldi)

HERE is a brief synopsis of the collection for anyone interested in visiting:

Artkraft Strauss donated the materials to the NYPL's Manuscripts and Archives Division between 2007 and 2010. The documents are nicely indexed in this finding aid, which is a searchable PDF. They are grouped into 4 sets or "series", including executive office files, management files, job files, and photographs. Of these, the highlight (for me anyway) was the "Job Files" (Series III), which is comprised mostly of manila folders each generally corresponding to a sign made by Artkraft Strauss. Some of the folders are pretty slim, holding say a single draft contract for a job that was never executed. Others are pay dirt, with design sketches, illustrative correspondence, and other materials that document the sign's whole production.

The collection can be viewed at the NYPL's Manuscripts and Archives Division, by appointment only. To make an appointment, researchers should fill out a short online application form. Manuscripts and Archives is located at the north end of the NYPL's main reading room on 42nd Street. The materials are grouped into boxes; researchers can request up to five boxes at a time, a maximum of three times a day (that means 15 boxes a day - click here to see the opening hours). Leave your Esterbrooks at home: it's pencils only here. Photocopies can be made by staff only – visitors must make a log of what they want copied.

MANY THANKS to Tal Nadan at the NYPL.

AND NOW, THE BAD NEWS:

• From the Lost City blog, the super wonderful old sign of the Crown Deli Caterers in Borough Park has vanished (as has the deli).  A pretty cool new sign has appeared to advertise the storefront's new occupant (not a bank or a Starbucks but an ice cream parlor), but one hopes the old sign found a good home somewhere.

• Also from Lost City, the lovely streamlined marquee of the old Earle/Eagle theater in Jackson Heights is gone.  This was one of the very last vintage movie theater marquees anywhere in New York.

• Finally, via Kyle in Astoria - Walter's Hardware has gone and now so too has their sign.

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