Hotel Neon

I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon.  I never felt sadder in my life.

                                                                     Jack Kerouac, On The Road, published 1957

 

The sign lured you.  Like a hard-sell street hawker, its job was to drown out the competition.  This is the best hotel!  Stay here!  Once inside, you begin to realize that the brightness of the sign spoke less to the quality of the establishment than to the management's eagerness to get your money.  Outside, the sign's radiance promised a safe, clean respite.  In the room it's a different story: almost like a bait-and-switch, the bright light of the sign piercing into your room actually denies you the rest it promised.  (Unless, of course, it wasn't rest you came here for.)  Your cynical side tells you you've been had, that the management cares more about packing in as many guests as possible than about providing anyone with a decent night's sleep.  Soon it's common wisdom:  only dopes and suckers fall for those flashy neon signs.  Eventually, the hotel managers catch on, too.  Better hotels ditch neon.  The old hotels that keep the signs are those whose patrons are too dumb or too destitute to care.

Catalog pages from Chicago Sign Sales Corp of Charlotte, NC (top) and Specialty Neon Lights of Minneapolis, MN (below), c. mid-1930s.  (American Sign Museum)

This was the general idea.  Sure, you could just pull down the shade.  But here, at these old hotels, neon signs became identified with capitalism's downside – unscrupulous commodity pushers bent on profit for profit's sake.  As mainstream hotels did away with neon signs, the less reputable hotels that kept the signs deepened the association.  Especially in declining American cities, such signs conjured up scenes of vice and vermin, violence, alcohol and prostitution, gunshots in the night, hourly rates, loud domestic quarrels overheard through thin walls, unsavory "transient" guests dealing drugs in dim hallways, dead bodies found in musty rooms, where buzzing, flickering neon signs beamed indifferently through dirty windows.   
 

Frames from "Fallen Angel" (1945, above) and "Sorry Wrong Number" (below, 1948).

How this image became so indelibly etched in the mindset of the American mainstream is almost as fascinating as the imagery itself.   Writers and film makers exploited it, reflecting and perpetuating the association over and over again until no bohemian existence was complete without at least one sleepless night at the hands of a sign - ideally flashing - out the window of a cheap hotel room.  The ever present blinking sign motif appears in film as early as 1931, with director Mervyn LeRoy's "Little Caesar"(though the sign depicted belongs to a social club, not to a hotel).  Used perhaps to greatest effect in the hotel scene in Fritz Lang's 1945 film "Scarlet Street," the flashing sign device conveys disquietude, or, like a highway alert sign, warns of danger ahead. 

Frames from "Desparate" (1947, above) and "Scarlet Street" (1945, below).

Early on, it is interesting to note, filmmakers used incandescent bulb signs for this part, seizing on their obsolescence to set a fringe mise-en-scène.  The transition to neon came in the 1940s, possibly beginning with Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler's seminal hardboiled crime novel of 1941. "I lay on my back on a bed in a waterfront hotel and waited for it to get dark," recounts the redoubtable Philip Marlowe:  "The reflection of a red neon light glared on the ceiling. . . . I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them. . . . It got darker.  The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling."

Frames from "Thieves' Highway" (1949) and "Vertigo" (1958).

By the next decade, such vignettes made neon hotel signs an essential element of the film noir landscape, and of the bohemian iconography of demimonde characters such as Sal Paradise, protagonist of Jack Kerouac's beat novel On The Road.  From a tenderloin flophouse in San Francisco, Kerouac wrote, Paradise "looked out the window at the winking neons," after "a gray-faced hotel clerk let us have a room on credit. . . .  Then we had to eat, and didn't do so till midnight, when we found a nightclub singer in her hotel room who turned an iron upside down on a coathanger in the wastebasket and warmed up a can of pork and beans. . . .  I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life."

David Janssen, TV's "Fugitive," on the lam in 1963 (above). Joe Buck peers out from his room at Times Square's old Claridge Hotel in "Midnight Cowboy" (below, 1969).

Separated by due distance of time, all of this seems rather quaint today. In New York, most of those old divey flops of yesteryear have been born again as high-end condos and co-ops. Sure there are still cheap hotels and SROs, but they seem less notorious now, and old neon signs no longer count among their compulsory accoutrements. If we could find a dingy old hotel with such a sign, we might even stay there for nostalgia's sake, so that we could feel just a little bit like Sal Paradise, a died-in-the-wool bohemian.  In a roundabout way, the same negative connotations that once sullied neon's repute now add up to an appealing mystique.  Judge with caution today's pariahs; they may yet have the last laugh.

Jane Dickson, "Hotel Girl," 1982. (World House Gallery)

Sign for the musical "Rent", formerly hung from the facade of the Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street.  The neon hotel as bohemian icon. (T. Rinaldi)

One of New York's last functioning neon hotel signs, at the Hotel Roger Smith on Lexington Avenue and East 47th Street. (T. Rinaldi)

THIS IS THE SECOND 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 I: The Chelsea Hotel

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• Photos and a brief story on New York Neon ran in last week's New York Times, in a great article by Aidan Gardiner. 

• Another media mention in Curbed in a story by Dave Hogarty.
• By way of the Lost City blog, a last look at the ruins of the Sokol Brothers sign in Carrol Gardens, Brooklyn.

Working Girl Neon (19 Rector Street)

I know what what's on your mind, Tess McGill.  It's been a tough day.  Trouble at the office, and you just found out your boyfriend's been schtupping some cheap floozy on the side.  But I know what you're really thinking as you stand by the rail of the Staten Island ferry, gazing out at the Manhattan skyline.  Just like me, you're wondering: "what the hell is that red neon roof sign up there to the right of the Woolworth building?" 

OK, maybe that's not what Melanie Griffith's character had on her mind in this pivotal scene of Mike Nichol's 1988 film "Working Girl."  But it sure bugged me.  Such is my twisted, neon-obsessed view of the city.  A big roof sign in Lower Manhattan?  There aren't any there now, and I don't ever remember seeing one.  Oh well.  Tess McGill had bigger things to worry about, and so did I, really, so I filed this little mystery away into my mental accordion folder and turned my thoughts back toward the awesome eighties exploits of Melanie, Harrison, and Sigourney.

Working Girl mystery sign, at right. (Working Girl) 

Then, about two months ago, while browsing some old New York photos online, something caught my eye.  Something high up, on the upper reaches of one of the lesser-known downtown skyscrapers. 

19 Rector Street - the Working Girl mystery sign today. (T. Rinaldi)

The Working Girl mystery sign, I soon learned, belonged to a tower known only by its address: 19 Rector.  And, much to my surprise, the sign is still there, though it hasn't lit up in a good long time.  Its installation date is thus far unclear.  My search of the DOB web site was a bust.  The building went up in 1930, a jazz-age tower by architect Lafayette Goldstone, but the sign seems to be a later addition.  Zoning ordinances enacted in the 1960s pretty much banned roof signs like this (New York's skyline is less colorful now than it was then as a result).  But the city's restrictive sign laws probably wouldn't have applied in this instance, since the copy features only the building's address, not a commercial message.  Still, judging by the patina of its sheet metal channel letters, I'd suspect this guy was here well before the 1960s.

    

19 Rector, west facade, around the time of its completion in 1930.  The sign would be out of view, on the south elevation.  (Arthur Vitols, Byron Co. / Museum of the City of NY) 

 

The real mystery, though, is why the building let the sign go dark.  Actually, I suppose it's not so mysterious.  Just like the long dark roof sign over at Tudor City, the management probably just got tired of dealing with its upkeep.  A few of the letters probably went into a dim flicker; a steep repair quote sealed the deal, and the big red letters over 19 Rector joined New York's ghost fleet of darkened roof signs: Domino Sugar, Kentile Floors, Tudor City, the Hotel New Yorker.  In recent years, a few of these have come back to "light" (sorry!), albeit with LEDs rather than neon (see the Lackawanna Terminal sign in Hoboken and the Hotel New Yorker in Midtown).  Perhaps one day this old girl will get back to work, too.  To do so, however, may require some re-lettering: built to house offices, about 12 years ago the tower went condo, taking on a new address (88 Greenwich) in the process.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• In case you missed last week's post - the neon book is out the door!

• After my post two weeks ago, the Chelsea Hotel sign seems to have mysteriously come back to light.  Hmmmm....

• In LA, a candidate for the world's longest continually-functioning neon sign, at Clifton's Cafeteria on Main Street.

• It's not neon, but on a related note - by way of various sources, the one and only Prime Burger on East 51st Street is closing.  A Landmark-worthy fortess of Formica, with a pretty good old back-lit sign hidden under its awning.  A nauseating loss.

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