Neon restaurant signs

The four gases used initially by neon signs – neon, argon, krypton, xenon – were discovered by English scientists in the 1890s and adapted for use in signs by Frenchman Georges Claude a short time later. Though not the first, an early neon sign was used in Paris in 1913 to advertise Cinzano vermouth. [shown above: Mac’s, Corpus Christi TX]

But it wasn’t until the late 1920s that the signs became popular with restaurants in America. Particularly in the West where car culture was developing, the eye-catching signs helped attract the attention of drivers.

In the early days neon signs in a town’s business district could also be taken as a sign of progressiveness. A 1929 advertisement for an electrical display company in Great Falls MT advised businesses that their adoption of a neon sign would impress people, encourage progress, and “beautify Great Falls.”

Their use became well established in the 1930s. In the 1934 book Curious California Customs, the author commented, “To the casual visitor, Wilshire Boulevard, after dark, is a flashing cavern of Neon signs, most of which are calling attention to eating places.” A later postcard of Hollywood Boulevard at night in the 1950s demonstrates the effect of a street full of neon signs [shown above].

In the late 1920s the signs began moving across the country. Among early adopters were eight Benish Restaurants in St. Louis, four White Way Hamburger outlets in Colorado, the Horn & Hardart Automats in Philadelphia, and four Janssen’s Hofbraus in New York City. Salt Lake City outfitted multiple New York Coney Island Sandwich Shops with the signs.

Bright neon signs and images remained quite popular throughout the country into the 1940s. But if they were meant to make a business stand out from the crowd, that became more and more difficult as the numbers grew.

Neon signs were undoubtedly most effective for roadside restaurants on dark roads that stayed open at night [above: [Bratten’s Grotto, Salt Lake City, 1956]. Or for eating places in somewhat obscure locations that required signs that could be seen from afar. Unfortunately, they didn’t look as impressive during the daylight hours [below: Bratten’s Grotto, daytime].

Before neon, efforts to craft signs that could attract distant or speeding traffic were undoubtedly less successful, less visible in the dark. George’s grotesquely large sign shown below, for example, was neither attractive nor sufficiently visible at night. As a slightly later version of this postcard revealed, the restaurant soon found it necessary to add spotlights atop the sign.

Neon wasn’t for every eating place. To critics it lacked artistic pedigree and dignity. Elite restaurants wanted nothing to do with it. It might announce the presence of the Green Frog or the Zig Zag Sandwich Shop, but certainly not New York’s La Chaumiere.

A 1960 book on restaurant decor pronounced neon in bad taste, saying, “Incandescent lighting is more expensive but has a kindlier glow and, thanks to the bad association arising from the tasteless use of neon, is generally considered ‘classier.’” As cities declined with the growth of suburbs, such attitudes toward neon grew more negative.

Nor was neon welcome in classy towns and communities such as Palm Springs, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and Sonoma in California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Hamptons on Long Island; and Cohasset, Massachusetts, to name but a few that banned it.

Rejection of neon grew in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, food critic and editor Craig Claiborne was uneasy about eating in the one (barely) acceptable restaurant he could find in Roswell NM, which he said had “the air of something once removed from Las Vegas or Miami Beach with its neon-silhouetted champagne glass and flashing neon bubbles.” His unease increased upon stepping inside and seeing a lighted goldfish tank, male customers not wearing coats, and bartenders with “narrow, abbreviated ties.”

Antipathy to neon in the 1970s, as before, was associated with urban decay and seedy neighborhoods characterized by run-down buildings and businesses such as bars and strip clubs. More cities and towns banned it.

Soon there were few “tube benders” left who could create or repair neon signs, which were increasingly being replaced with lighted plastic signs that were easier and cheaper to make and less prone to damage outdoors. Yesterday’s real neon signs that had survived soon showed up as quaint wall decor in warehouse-style theme restaurants.

A few commentators, such as a reporter for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, began to wonder about the return of neon. She speculated in 1975 that “that much-maligned symbol of everything that’s bad about American commercial districts” might “someday be recognized as art.”

Sure enough, in 1976 the Smithsonian put on an exhibit that included neon signs, among them examples from a Kosher restaurant, a foot-long hotdog place in Cleveland, and from a Spanish-American restaurant in Greenwich Village, a many-colored creation that combined a lobster, pig, fish, chicken, crab, and a steaming coffee cup.

Nowadays, vaguely quaint-looking plastic “neon” signs might show up as interior wall decor in the sort of restaurants that want to suggest they are fun places.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024