 play here in the Bay Area. SFBL encourage you to learn more about first-person culture and land rights and we're committed to hosting events and providing educational resources on these topics and you can find that in the link. As I said we have two more events with SF Neon and Tenderloin Museum next one July 28th Neon Matchbook and that's a partnership also with Letterform Archive. Everybody loves them and then we have our own favorite he's still ours we call him Jim Van Buskirk who is used to be the Hormel Center Librarian and he will be doing a presentation about celluloid and neon and now I'm going to breeze through all of the amazing events that we do have for summer every Tuesday night we have an author talk June July and August so please come through for that and look at this all of these amazing authors are with us so it's going to be a fun summer Saturday we have the California Native Plant Society always super informational and then we have community presenter Linda Jackson who will be talking about black music in San Francisco it is Black Music Appreciation Month in June California Book Awards hey day I love hey day and we are celebrating the magic years Jonathan Taplan's new book and he will be in convo with Grail Marcus SF Arts Commission did a COVID in Artist in Residence so they will be doing a panel and so like you can see we just have a ton of stuff so we hope you will come join us in all of these virtual libraries and in person we are finally opening up so rejoice friends and so tonight I am really excited for like I said one of three and the book launch of neon alight history and I am going to turn it over to our partner Katie from the Tenderloin Museum hello everyone and welcome to a book launch and discussion for neon alight history my name is Katie Connery and I'm the executive director of the Tenderloin Museum thank you so much for having me the Tenderloin Museum opened in 2015 with the mission of uncovering the lost history of the Tenderloin as well as celebrating the vibrant present day community and we do that through historical exhibitions an art gallery walking tours and weekly public programming we're currently open 10 to 5 Tuesday through Saturday with walking tours every Saturday at 1 so please come by and see us you can also pick up a copy of neon alight history there the Tenderloin Museum is the fiscal sponsor of san francisco neon and our long-term collaborators and friends and together we've collaborated on neon art shows public programming and walking tours and we have an initiative with the city to restore neon signs in the Tenderloin neighborhood called Tenderloin neon a to z and we'd love it if you could join us for our next event with SF neon and the san francisco public library on topography of the matchbook featuring steven coals from the letter form archive on july 28th this event is inspired by our 2019 publication of the matchbook and we during that time also produced an exhibition and public program series about historic matchbooks from the Tenderloin in the early 1900s the 1950s and we really discovered doing that project that you could really learn a lot about history through the aesthetics of the past and I would describe matchbooks at the intersection of design art advertising art and nightly history and I would definitely say the same about neon signs so the connection between matchbooks and neon signs I think was immediately obvious to us and we collaborated with SF neon throughout the exhibition on public programming regarding the matchbook and the ephemera exhibit including the topography of the matchbook event which was a huge hit and we hope to see you for that presentation on july 28th so without further ado I'd like to turn things over to the authors of this exciting book uh paul india further ado no further ado thank you katie it's great to partner with san francisco public library thank you very much um with the tenderloin museum and of course um with SF neon and uh randall and homa and al barna we're talking about our book today and um we conceptualized it from the outset as a partnership with randall and al because they're great collaborators and we've worked with them in the past and have um enjoyed how um two plus two equals six or seven or eight whenever we do so um so it's great to be here tonight thank you all for joining us i'm going to share my screen so that you can see our slides stand by thank you technical difficulties all right um you should all be seeing the first slide somebody holler out if you're not because now i can't see the chat at this moment um randall ann is going to be monitoring that uh for us and and uh we'll we'll check in with your questions uh a little bit later so i'll introduce myself and then paul introduced himself so i'm didia delizor i'm a geography professor at cal state fullerton and uh i've been doing research and publishing on the american landscape and the california landscape for about 25 years this work is a project that paul and i part of a project paul and i've been working on for more than 10 years um and it's funded through generous grants from the anders foundation the national endowment for the humanities and the national trust for historic preservation also the book explicitly benefits the museum of neon art and and was conceived of as a project to benefit the museum of neon art where i serve um on the on the board of trustees have also served in the past on the board of the american sign museum enough about me let's hear about you my name's paul um just a regular old guy doing the best he can with the meager gifts the good lord gave me something like that not really true but i've been working in the sign business since 1940 1947 1977 it feels like 1947 i meant to say 42 years um started off by accident making neon signs and haven't learned so move on all right so um one of the things that we really wanted to do in in our book was to unite our very different kinds of expertise and use that to think about neon signs really differently partly we unravel little known histories and and and correct some misunderstood myths in order to reveal how neon signs have transformed the american landscape and how they've helped us build community beneath their light so we'll start from the beginning with how neon signs came to be something that's widely misunderstood and uh and i imagine that some of you know know something about neon's history and and others may be new to it so uh we'll try to reach both groups um can i talk about daniel mcfarland i think you will anyway daniel mcfarland more is really one of my heroes um it's he who really successfully made the first commercial luminous tube signs in the mid 1890s this is long before most people understood that luminous tubing uh had been commercialized and had been made he was working in new york and new york and new new work new jersey and the new york city metropolitan area what he did that was so amazing was make cold white light so as you can see in the large photograph um tubes glowing white tubes that could light a room without producing heat absolutely revolutionary he also bent them into signs and uh by in 1910 or 1912 there were luminous tube signs aligning broadway in new york unfortunately his patents were bought out by general electric who perceived him as a threat so he was crushed um and then later in retirement was murdered by a jealous electrician on the other hand there's george claude keep going you're on a roll no no he's for you you get to talk about the the evil guy i get to talk about the bad guy yeah oh he's not really that bad he was just uh he was kind of the Edison of france he patented things he didn't necessarily invent things but he capitalized on things and saw the use of them so when he formed his company air liquid one of the byproducts was the gas neon and the gas argon and he petitioned for uh daniel mcfarland more to put neon in more tubing which existed in paris now we're looking basically at more tubing that has been pumped with neon and i believe that's 1911 or 12 1910 sorry 1910 okay so much much much earlier than we think of as neon the neon sign so but the but the noble gases neon and argon really revolutionized the ability to make luminous tube signs and in the us by the mid 1920s signs under george claude's patents and signs under the patents of of a whole slew of american companies um were competing um and spreading all across the united states um but one of the origin stories of how signs arrived or began in the us um is widely misunderstood take it hand off yep so allegedly um for 50 60 70 years now this photo has been proof of the original neon sign in the us installed at a packard dealer in los angeles in 1922 he purchased from claude neon at the paris exposition um the word paris there is such a place as paris but that's about the only truth in the whole story uh this picture was taken in 1929 or 1930 celebrating the new packard dealership uh if you move on any photos we'll so we did a lot of research to try to understand we wanted to find a picture of that sign in its original location and used air photos to identify the sign uh and then did a lot of research that showed us that that sign couldn't have been first um the the sign in question arrived in los angeles in december of 1925 which was about two or three years later than the original sign the or sign had shown up in in myth so we found uh we found data a series of dated air photos and then the original building permits and we're able to date the sign you can see it does exist um so this is a close-up of the air photo and it's blurry but what you can see in this is a later version of other packard logo signs and it you the the logo uses uh radio masks and radio waves to suspend the packard logo and then you can kind if you know that that's what they were doing you can then kind of see a radio mask and radio waves and the packard logo in the box um so that sign did exist but it was it existed too late um not until 1925 too late to be the first neon sign in the united states but then for those of you in san francisco look at this picture that we found which um has only as far as we know once before been published in in another work of ours this is the url see anthony packard dealership on van s in san francisco the building still stands slightly remodeled um there's some really interesting signage on this building um can you describe it for us paul yeah did you found this photo looking through archives and showed it to me and i was playing old eagle eye and i noticed that first off this sign was electric it's not a light bulb sign because it's too shallow to change any bulbs so we did some more research we found that in the early teens in paris uh george claude had made signs with glass faces and neon behind the glass face and he was doing that in 1913 1914 just prior to world war one so it's not much of a stretch of an imagination to say that url see anthony bought these signs from george claude at the paris exposition and brought them to san francisco now also in our research we found a description of the original signs that url see anthony bought and it said it was a large script of his signature and below that was the packard logo well so are these the earliest luminous tube signs mounted outdoors filled with neon gas in the united states they could be so interesting sidebar interesting sidebar perhaps some of you can find more information more photographs um uh more about this sign but let's move on um let's talk about colors because neon now we know we the neon we know today is is all kinds of colors but it didn't start out that way at all yeah neon originally was done with clear glass and the only two colors that had any kind of oomph to them were neon red and argon blue argon itself was kind of a little bit on the light side but you could put a little bit of mercury in it which gave the oomph so the signs up until the early 30s were almost all either red neon or blue mercury argon on clear glass so the 1920s to the early 1930s neon landscape was red and blue and red and blue you had incandescent signs but the neon was so much brighter it really really popped the colors developed later in in in the united states not until the early and mid 1930s and they the the myriad colors that we have today were developed by using colored glass tubing and different colors of phosphor coatings on the inside of the tubes um and so those colors erupted in the in the mid 1930s are around the US and that's what created the rainbow that we see today and it wasn't until then until well 1938 that they came oh you want to know I was just going to really quickly say that these techniques were all invented in Europe in the early 30s like 31 32 but they didn't work their way overseas until like the late 30s 38 39 and now you're going to move on to so remember it was Daniel McFarlane Moore who made the first commercial luminous tubing and his tubing was white well white neon luminous tubing or or our mercury argon filled luminous tubing didn't exist in this country until 1938 when the Earl Carroll theater debuted on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles now the Earl Carroll theater was at the time a revolutionary idea because it was a dinner theater and it was basically kind of a high-class burly cue show of the type that Earl Carroll had been doing for probably 25 years um what they did is they designed a building in the feeling of a world's fair display building like the General Motors building the Chrysler building just this giant block of cement but to adorn the block of cement they used neon and you can see in the postcard that they're using neon bars that produces kind of a step effect on the front of the building they're using a neon face they're using a neon halo over the face and then they're using fairly what we consider standard channel letters for everything else the cool thing about it was the word theater actually flashed to read eat at the theater eat at the theater very clever clever clever clever i get to talk about the geography um so fire fire one ready quickly thank you so uh by the mid 1920s two things were really coming together one was the technology for luminous tube signs filled with neon um or or mercury argon um but the other thing was automobiles and together with uh hard surfaced roads so reliable affordable automobiles are from the mid 1920s um widely across the us and what one reason why neon and cars went so well together was because because of the way that neon tubing is bent in the shape of whatever whatever letters people understood that when you were reading a neon sign you weren't reading a light bulb sign which connected a series of dots you were reading the letters and the words themselves you were reading the light as if it was searing directly into your brain so neon was understood to be able to be read at greater speed and the in the automobile and aircraft era speed was a real thing in fact the 20s were called the speed age like we have the internet age right um so speed was a really big deal and neon was the forward-looking technology for the speed age and the automobile age but also neon part of the art skill of neon is taking a three dimensional item and making it into a two-dimensional item by use of skillful bending and walkout paint well when you're a car it's it reads as two-dimensional you don't see the little zigzags and the whirligigs and things like that then um with the depression and the uh and roosevelt's multiple relief programs um a whole series of things influenced the development and spread of neon signs so the first one was the repeal of prohibition in in 1933 which by 1934 every place wanted to advertise that they sold beer and they were doing it with neon signs so there was a literally in the depression a boom in neon signs that said beer and then federal programs for relief like the storefront modernization program that that gave loans and grants to business owners in order to upgrade and modernize their storefront often with neon just think of it your name john law beer that sounds good sounds pretty good yeah i hope it's good beer then after the war something else really significant i was born no that's later it is after the war it was after the war i can't think of anything significant other than that uh i can imagine how that would happen so uh fdr signed the gi bill into law um which allowed returning servicemen from world war two and servicemen and women to to to go to universities and vocational schools for free and neon schools were one of the things that counted so hundreds if not thousands of returning veterans went to neon school and what that meant for the neon landscape and for the us was um at that time if you had one skilled bender the man who went to neon school um and his presumably his wife the two people their family could start a small sign shop in a in a small city or town somewhere out on a highway and make a living and support their family and so beginning after the war you see the the opening of hundreds and hundreds of small neon shops many of them are still existent today you'll see founded in 1946 and and you'll learn that a shop has been you know four generations in the same family and also the other thing that happened was in the early 1930s george claus patents ran out and so that took the thrust of the business from the large companies that could afford the patent payments to mom and pops again right so by the 1940s without without those patents um the small a small mom and pop shop could absolutely flourish well what is it that neon signs do of course uh we often think of them as advertising but what they really do is attract that so they work geographically they draw people in they draw people to your business or your product so whether it's inside the corner confectionary on the left with their brand new post prohibition beer signs on the back wall or whether it's to the richfield gas station and steak shop on the right the signs are drawing are drawing people in that's what most neon signs do but they don't all necessarily do that because they can equally work to distance and to keep people away as was the case with with this uh sign in mobile alam at alabama famously photographed by gordon parks the sign by the way has been been preserved by the history museum of mobile and it's been preserved broken so that it can never again be lit but i could fix it after so much after so much success by the 1950s and into the 1960s things began to shift for neon and neon became the object of some disdain the funny thing about this picture this was in the san fernando valley on of enter a boulevard and it's obviously foreshortened just for effect but i remember this all real well i remember just thinking wow what a lot of stuff this picture was probably taken about 1962 or 63 and almost all those signs are gone except for right in the center there art's delicate tests and still still kicking away the deli and the sign yeah so with this kind of sign density it was easy for people to say this is too much so there hadn't apparently been sufficient regulation and signs were trying to outdo and outcompete one another and so signs became disdain and a landscape morality that legislated and and ruled against signs and and specifically against neon signs emerged across the us including scrap old signs campaigns organized by the sign industry itself beginning in the mid 1960s across the us they would declare scrap old sign day or scrap old sign week and take down a broken and functional owned and abandoned historic signs neon and incandescent we lost thousands and thousands and thousands of our historic signs as part of lady bird johnson's highway beautification programs and it just seemed like a good idea at the time it seemed like a good idea at the time so by the 1970s and into the 80s neon signs were really becoming endangered could you talk about the well that comparison and the technology and what was shifting you can see what's happening here is that the one on the left has a neon lettering on top of the sign now the amf bowling one may well have neon in addition to the bowling pin which is neon but it would be behind the plastic because plastic became the thing it was clean it was easy it was kind of a dumbing down of the skill set you could make a box and slap a piece of plastic on it run some neon underneath then that became put a piece of plastic down and fluorescent tube underneath and now it's leds so it's it's gone down down down down down so with a descaling in the industry and new technologies the plastic faces that became popular after the war and fluorescent tubing lighting it from behind or or leds neon became more and more endangered so not only disdained but also literally endangered with components manufacturers going out of business sign shops closing up other shops closing their neon plants but all this time and for long before neon has also always been art and often we we most often think of neon art in in this country as having emerged in the 1960s it's actually quite a bit older with the work of Zdenek Pashanyak in Czechoslovakia who who merged this new form in the mid 1930s this new form of neon this technological form together with natural forms in this case a woman's torso also a lot of you know tree and and and and natural plant imagery or the work of Lucio Fontana in Italy who who lit entire spaces indoors with his neon art neon art continues to be vibrant today and i know Amy's going to talk about that um this is the work of Roxy Rose who is a neon artist who also is a skilled signmaker and a highly skilled neon uh glassblower a tube vendor and and works now to make art against oppression but that's a good example of how neon signs are and always have been handmade yeah no one has ever figured out a way to have neon sign made by a machine it always has to be a person it always has to have somebody blowing on the tube it has to have somebody heating up the glass bending it whether that's Amy no there's Amy yeah or Chewie like yeah that's not Amy or Chewie and that's true so that's true of of of making the glass of bending the glass that's also true of the way that the installations are done themselves so the work that John does well he was working on a pre-neon sign I guess earlier today so and there's Paul working on a sign that appeared in in Pasadena mysteriously behind a false front several months ago and he's working to restore that one of that that raises one of the really interesting things so it's made by hand and it's still made by hand almost a hundred years after they really proliferated across the U.S. using in almost exactly the same equipment really it's neon's longevity this is something that there is no way that Daniel McFarland Moore or George Claude or anyone could have predicted this can you talk about these ones Paul well the one on the left is Acme beer which was a California brewing company this was probably made right out of the gate after prohibition 1934 it is the Acme is neon and the on ice is uranium glass with I believe krypton inside it's very very pale these things have been working this is on our kitchen table right now and it's been working since 1934 running the same gas the same glass and the same transformer the philippe signs probably also around the same vintage early 30s still working some of the glass that's on there is from the 50s or earlier still working basically it means you know those those signs for philippes they've been working outdoors at night and there's five five signs on that business they've been working outdoors at night for 90 years 95 years that is a longevity that nobody would have ever imagined and and what it means is it also has not yet reached its limit because neon will light up in its tube indefinitely it doesn't burn so nobody knows how long these signs might potentially last so that brings us to preservation the neon sign landscape at one time it looked like this this is hollywood yeah hollywood and highland so and this was you know atypical for any main main street in a big city broadway market street vine street hollywood highland they all look like this so at one time neon signs were lighting our landscape with tremendous color and vibrancy and of course we know that that isn't the case anymore well beginning in the 1970s individuals and groups began to preserve work to preserve neon signs so for example the route 66 organizations in every state along the route have worked really hard to raise private money grant money federal money to restore the landscape of route 66 in totality so every neon sign every motel every cafe and and the highway itself and they have and they vibrant communities that that work um to keep that landscape lit we can see now that there's a whole neon preservation community and that's been helped a lot by sf neon and albarna and randall and homen publishing a book like saving neon a best practices guide where people who are interested in learning how to save a neon sign in their community and and and how to get it done right how to get it how to get it preserved how to get it restored relit correctly um can go to the sf neon website and buy that book um but preservation isn't always enough because if you're sitting outside and you're a lit electric sign you may need more now this was the hotel california which was on uh sixth and bonnie bray near macArthur park in los angeles uh the building burned down in the mid 1990s and oddly enough because of the uh eagle song hotel california somebody thought hotel california was close enough we should save the sign which was great they saved the sign probably for the wrong reasons they saved two of them um that's the picture up on the top left was probably taken 25 years ago um before they got really really really destroyed sitting in a park um a well-known actress got one of the signs and pretty much destroyed it and then i was hired to restore the other one after it'd been sitting outside for about 20 some odd years very very very bad shape stripped it found out the original colors remade all the metal um obviously remade the glass transformers it was one of the few signs i've never had been able to work on where they gave us a permit to put a roof mounting on it because that's a significant no no um but because this was a city sponsored project they allowed us to do that so this is me and my crew put in the uh glass on so fortunately now there's an entire movement across the country where more and more signs are being preserved and more and more signs are being restored and restored well and restored accurately it can be quite a bit of work as paul described for for hotel california and we can talk about that more um when we get a chance to answer your questions in the chat um but it shows us a little bit about neon's community the way that people are coming together in the case of hotel california um this was uh when the sign was relit it was a big celebration that included well the crew the residents of the building the developer who built the building and paid for the work um the city council person the preservation community these are groups of people that usually exist uneasily side by side they don't they don't usually get along well together and and the neon sign restoration project brought them all together into something that they all supported and neon signs in that way that that is that is the work that they can do they can bring to people together to create community and this restaurant pans um down here in southern california is is a great example of that now the man who owns it is the son of the original builders and founders of the restaurant who hired high-end architects to design it in what we now call the googie style um but about five years ago they went through a total renovation and brought it back to its original 1950s look including restoring the sign um which i did so they did not leave out the sign when they restored the building and its interior um and that that restaurant has a vibrant local following as well as a vibrant vibrant international following of those who are really interested in mid-century modern and and googie coffee shop architecture science spins by the way so all this to say that neon's light has been tremendously enduring and continues to be so it vibrantly creates communities um bringing people together underneath neon's glow and and that i think is um that's what that that's what i've learned at least maybe you always knew that maybe in 1947 when you were born you knew that coming out of the egg i probably forgot it already but you knew it when you hatched but um so neon draws people together and we mark moments in our lives as the people in these images were obviously doing we mark moments in our lives with our neon signs and and and we're drawn to businesses that have neon signs and that's always been the case and it remains the case now so we thank you for um joining us and listening to us tonight we look forward to taking your questions we look forward to hearing uh what the other folks have to say um and we'll look forward to continuing to talk about neon but i'll stop my screen share um so that somebody else can talk thank you thank you so much didia and paul you haven't break that at your doorstep that's right well and that we'll circle back to that but really what we want to talk about is um how honored we are i'm randall and homa this is and we are the designers and publishers of um this is a wonderful book that that paul and didia wrote and where can you get this you can get it at the tenderloin museum or at green arcade books or online at sfneon.org and thumb through it really just so people can see how how packed oh look at how's that it's got a cloud with the with the drum that says liquor so you just got to get this book right um yeah so we're just showing this book off a little bit we loved loved working on it and it really is just so easy to absorb an amazing amount of it really fun history about neon and and america for that matter um but enough about the book i'm gonna share our do you want are you still showing something i start reading it okay i'm gonna i'm gonna share our we have a quick little powerpoint here for you um we also just want you to know since we think most of you are san franciscans that there is an organization in your city that works to rescue signs that are about to go into the dumpster and that's us we're san francisco neon we wouldn't exist without the tenderloin museum they're our physical sponsor um and we work with katie in the tenderloin to save signs but we also save signs in the excelsior and um russian hill and um china town we do walking tours um and we'll bring those back um probably um i don't know january one is that a good day maybe after new years yeah uh so we're all about saving signs in san francisco so that's what we do we're at sf neon dot org and we also published books and these are our four titles that we've published and um san francisco neon was the first book then we did the neon icons book and that was a joint publication with the sf pl which is awesome yeah it was a great experience and then started working with dd and paul and they wrote the introduction to saving neon and then neon alight history came next so if you have room on your neon bookshelf we can help you out all of these um titles are pretty fun and you know where you can and if you you can always build a neon bookshelf you can start a starter set you could all right so we want to talk about our favorite page in the neon alight history book and it's the one that has the beautiful lipo lounge sign and if you haven't been to lipo lounge on grant avenue in china town it's really a place for locals it's not a tourist place and they have one of the most unusual signs and um it's a 3d chinese lantern and this was fully restored through a grant from the city matching grant by the aerosine company and it really represents in the book like the other picture which is a fully restored sign that was done by the museum of neon art in china town in la and these are just some um restoration projects that we're so proud of and so proud that the community's come together to make these happen right and we're talking about page 69 and 70 here yeah if you want to bookmark those and and the thing that i appreciate about those two pages is what a nice breakdown paul and d d have done uh discussing sign preservation and restoration options i think that's really helpful for people for people who maybe are a little overwhelmed with what you're supposed to do with an old neon sign on your business or that's in your family i think they really break it down nicely and uh the book these pages also included great explanation in regard to the difference between collectors neon collectors neon museums and offsite neon installations as opposed to on-site preservation efforts so uh page 69 and page 70 serve as a real guide for contacting organizations and it just definitely makes people aware that there are people and there are organizations who are available to give you advice and consult and help you preserve or save a neon sign in your community so it's not just a history book it really is it really is a reference reference book um and one that we just found through all the time okay so yeah next we we we wanted to bring um two of our local neon aficionados to be on this panel and because they they love the book that's right so i now i like to introduce you to amy palms amy is an artist a neon artist a tube bender and is also the owner of rebel neon her shop is here in san francisco and you need neon repairs done and neon signs fabricated call amy and we'll put her um we'll we'll put her website in the chat all right amy you're on all right thanks everybody uh thanks randall and al and tenderline museum and didi and paul uh that book is so great i love it um and i just wanted to talk about page 63 um which has roxy roses art on the cover um i think yeah randall's putting it on yes and and this is um this is meaningful to me because um i went to art school that's where i learned how to do neon glass bending and neon art uh from the great fred cheetah um and then i went i left art school and wanted to continue working with um neon in my art i like to do mixed media with neon and so i started working in different sign shops i went to michigan for a while and looked for a sign company there and i got into a few group shows here and there um and then um kind of got a little bit disillusioned with neon i felt like when i put neon art in a group show people were drawn to it as kind of eye candy um and then uh so i started getting embarrassed by that and i um started really uh pulling away from the art world and kind of honing my craft trying to learn glass bending as a sign maker and i did that for a number of years um for about let's see i lived in michigan worked there and then i moved to san francisco in the late nineties and worked for a few sign shops out here and um it actually wasn't until uh 2017 shana peterson actually introduced me to maryl paddocky who was curating women in neon called she bends and she um she invited me to participate in the san francisco show and i kind of got this spark back in me to make neon art again and that's where i saw this piece here by roxy rose it was the photo doesn't do it justice it's magnificent you just it was in this room and you walk in and there's this huge it's gigantic and it's slowly spinning and it's political and it's about love and it's i don't know it just blew me away so um there was another piece there by roxy as well that also was amazing 3d uh self-standing art and um it supported itself and so um i kind of i don't know what i guess what i wanted to say about roxy's piece is um um she grew up making neon her whole life neon signs then got into art and her art is political she talks about transgender issues asian hate black lives matter and she puts it all in neon and when you see a neon sign it's kind of like it's very powerful because it's you know it's words in neon that make you just i don't know neon signs like they tell you that signs are like rules right they have a lot of power they tell you where to go what to do what not to do so when you see something like roxy's art it just is it's really wonderful um anyway so uh getting back to she bends when i got into those shows it was really it changed my mind about making neon art i kind of got into it especially being in a group show with other artists who were also working with neon in their art um it didn't feel like i was standing out for making neon um so yeah i guess that's pretty much it i um i if you have any questions just let me know but that's that's all i have to say about that thank you so much amy and yeah we are ready for you guys if you've got questions we've got a couple which we are going to answer after the next panelist but um keep those questions coming and amy thank you so much thanks for and your beautiful artwork that's behind you thanks for showing that off yeah thank you amy in this room and thanks for joining us tonight and and focusing on Roxy we're big fans of Roxy Rose too as are Paul and Dio which is why we put such a big picture because that is an amazing piece and hopefully we'll bring that back to the bay area and we can show it off again as well as the rest of the sheathbends and there is there's a great link sheathbends.com or.org and you can read all about that women's uh neon artist association which is pretty cool pretty amazing yeah group of people all right and now i'd like to introduce our next and final panelist uh mr john law john is a longtime barrier sign man and uh apparently he's also the owner of the john law brewery so the floor is yours the floor is yours wow okay i don't know about the brewery but uh i at first i have to say thank you so much to everybody who's contributed to this presentation to the book and to basically the the ongoing efforts to preserve neon and neon lighting and the history and i i'm going to thank start with the sf library i've been a big fan of the sf library since the days of the iron librarian gladis hanston in the 70s still doing good work there the tenderloin museum and katie doing amazing work uh on the history of that neighborhood and beyond and supporting uh randall and al and sf neon which is fabulous and uh just i can't uh say more good things about um and of course the museum of neon art down in uh in la and paul and diddia for making this amazing book and doing the work that they do um i gotta say i mean i'm a sign hanger uh like paul i got involved in the sign trades back in 1947 uh oh wait a second oh shit um pardon my french it was 19 uh it was actually 1984 and i'd been involved in sign making uh since 78 77 78 um commercial signage little door signage and uh lawyers office that sort of thing and then i i was looking around and i thought i could make more money uh working in the neon trades and so i i got into that through various means and over those over the ensuing decades i've had the incredible uh great luck and uh and good fortune to uh to be blessed to work on some of the biggest and most amazing neon displays in the in the bay area um from the cnh sugar sign and crocket which is still still there to the canadian club board uh down in 1001 um brandon street visible from the freeway uh i work with paul norton uh at service one signs uh and federal sign we did the restoration on the rotating neon star on the surferances rake hotel back in uh 1999 i think it was and since been taken to the neon's been taken off of it very unfortunately and i hope that that changes at some point in the future um i still keep the my small business uh central sign services uh i still keep the corda san francisco sign going the hills brothers coffee sign which we did a complete restoration including replacing rotted out sheet metal um paul trotman and i did back about 15 years ago and it's still in great shape and so i i really relate to paul a lot as a fellow a fellow sign hanger service man a sign maker and his he's worked on some amazing signs in los angeles which being a bigger city has more more neon displays back in the day and still some that are still existing and i know he's worked on some really great ones there's so many stories i mean the history of neon to neon in electrical sign makers is handed down it's a verbal history it has been which is why this book is so amazing because uh diddy and paul have dug up so much information kind of countering some of the popular myths that you'd find if you're a sign maker uh such as claud neon basically inventing neon and coming out with it's great to find out that uh that this guy uh daniel mccarlin more uh who is it from from new york actually the first guy to use illuminated tubes and the way that he did and actually did signage uh 25 years before neon became popular and that was something i learned from reading this book that just completely blew my mind it was counter to what i'd i'd been told for decades really um and i were i had a great good luck to work for a couple of major sign companies i worked for federal sign company as a young apprentice sign hanger uh actually shawna peterson was a started as a glass bender there about the same a little bit after i started as a as a sign hanger and service man and uh so the stories are handed down for instance uh sign guys and gals now uh would communicate before you had your little iphone that told you how where you were going you know two of those dots coming together on a screen that would explain you how to get from point a to point b sign guys would communicate uh on how to get from one place to another by signs so for instance you would say something like oh you go down there go down that way you take a left at the big union 76 rotator and then you go a few blocks down and you see that big skeleton tube job on the site with saris glass you know the one i'm talking about and you take take a right there and you go about 10 blocks down right and then there's that that big you know the big uh uh city of paris uh you know tower and you take a right there and then you're at you're at your location that's how we would communicate on how to get from place to place and uh so i don't know what to say about the sign trades i was very fortunate to get in and it's the best trade to be in if you're going to be a tradesman uh it's way better than roofing let's put it that way um over the years has also fortunate to be involved uh in some capacity uh for many years in the underground san francisco art scene and ended up at one point incorporating uh neon into some of the work that i was doing uh prominently designing the first uh uh neon skeleton for the burning man which is one of the things that i did back in 1990 uh 91 first years that we had glass on that structure and i've also worked in uh in some other capacities but but but i'm primarily a sign hanger and a service man and and like i say that that trade is uh uh it's by far the best one in so many ways because you're incorporating i mean you get to move around a lot i mean there's so much uh spoken about and rightfully so about glass benders tube benders as we call them and what an incredible trade to learn how to do and to apprentice and become good at i mean i always knew that it took uh uh several years in a production shop from what i could tell to become a really quality a real quality glass bender and have really good clean bends and uh and welds um but then taking that and and into art as amy palms and other other fabulous neon artists have um you know incorporating those two things to me i tried to do that a little bit in my time and um so uh i don't know what else to say i mean the book is amazing i really liked uh the entire book and learning about the history of neon in ways that i didn't know and like like filling out certain areas i was a little bit sketch on and um you know i particularly liked um you know the the restoration work that you find later in the book i think starting around page 67 or so the paul and diddy get into the actual restoration work that they and other people have been involved in on signage and having done some rest of work myself i can really appreciate that and the work that goes into it the skill and time to really do it right because you know neon signs when they when they first came out were much cheaper than the old incandescent bulb signs that had been popular uh you know since edison took over that whole field back in the 1890s and uh and so neon came in it was much cheaper it's actually an ecological move forward because you use much less power as it's been commented on than the old incandescent bulb signs and so uh in that way was a real advancement technological advancement in many ways it was helpful and also just the quality of light that you get with neon is very different from any other light source that you might use i mean particularly these later later day uh you know led lighting which is you know very functional and cheap and easy to do and before that you know in the fifties when incandescent lamps came in and plastic face signs which you know there's some art and some artifice in in those signs as well for sure you know there's some sign historians that have gone into that as well but it's just interesting seeing a trade that was so disparaged when i first came into it because there was this whole idea in city planning back in the 70s and 80s from academic academics and city planners that neon signs and lighting in general were bad things to have on the city streets and it was a whole aesthetic or an anti-aesthetic that came about and suffused city planning departments and there was a real you know they really kind of put down neon signs and it became uh unpopular and and and considered to be d-class a sort of and which is really nuts when you just look at it on this the simple you know uh uh idea of looking at these signs and how much artifice went in them how much art went in them how beautiful some of them are so for some knuckleheads to you know in in academia to decide that there was some real problem with them uh aesthetically just kind of shocked me as a tradesman you know an unschooled uh tradesman without a college education it just seemed silly to me that people could could see this and so now with people like Randall and and Al and diddy and paul coming out and really really pushing for the uh uh you know the resurgence of the appreciation of the aesthetics of neon signs it's it's about time it's way over time we've lost so many great signs so many classic signs and and they're expensive you know compared to other things to to maintain and and uh and and service them but uh it's so valuable to do so and so I all I can say is just to end up here I don't want to keep rambling on but I'm so happy about this and and I I strongly recommend anybody out there to buy this book read it learn more about this history the architectural history of our country which is so amazing and so much of which we've lost and that which remains should be should be preserved I think and people should pay the money to do it and get uh you know governments and grants and private industry involved in in understanding the value to our culture and uh and our architectural heritage from us and that's all I gotta say thanks for very much for having me thank you John yeah thank you so much um we're gonna move to questions now and we've got questions for every single one of you but while you're on John before you leave um not leaving one of the questions um was if could you talk a little bit particularly on the signs that these big landmark signs that you maintain which I believe is starting with the Oakland Tribune Tower and if you could name the other ones and and what it takes to keep them going well like I say it's not like roofing it's actually kind of fun to work on big exterior spectacular signs it's as paul will certainly uh you know uh agree it's a lot of fun it's hard work it's physical work it can be it can be tough on your body uh but um so I maintain currently I kind of dial back my business quite a bit I no longer go into uh you know malls at you know midnight to install ugly plastic signs anymore like I did for much of my career as a sign hanger I've kept service work on three spectacular signs in the Bay Area that I still work on the Hills Brothers Coffee sign which as I mentioned we restored uh 20 years ago and uh and it's still in great shape the Port of San Francisco sign on the ferry building which uh is is a classic sign I mean it's in the opening scenes of you know the streets of San Francisco with Carl Maldon and Michael Douglas I mean it's probably the most visible sign uh maybe one of certainly one of the most visible signs in the state maybe the country and I keep I maintain that still myself um and the Tribune Tower sign with the neon clocks and then wrap around four-sided neon letters Tribune letters I've been maintaining that we got we have an issue with that right now I've got to circuit out so there's some letters out that's typically not the way it is so if you have to take a look at it we're fixing it it'll be back in 100% burning hopefully next week but uh okay so for the the only sign job that I still work on in a Boson's chair is the Tribune sign and Boson's chair is a little seed about that big that you sit your butt in and hang on some ropes in front of the sign and I have to do that in order to get at the neon uh clock handles the hour and the minute hand now that clock the the Oakland Tribune building is a is a unique it is a singular building and signage on it is singular and the clocks and the clock arms they used to be more of them certainly back in the 20s the 30s and 40s but I can't find in hardly any other examples in the world of neon clocks that have neon on the minute and hour hand and there are four of them on this on this sign and that's quite rare and the wraparound sign letters on the on the uh 16th floor 11 foot tall neon letters that say Tribune also that's quite rare they're cantilevered out from the building quite rare the building architecture is unique it's a fabulous building it's actually the most fabulous building in the state for my money and I am blessed to be able to work on it and try to keep it going it's a bit of work a lot of work and and you should also is your office still behind that clock is that I have a teeny weeny little office big as your bathroom up on the 22nd floor two flights above the above the last elevator stop and I've been through six owners of the building now since 1988 when I 89 when I first started working on it with Steve Bagley when I was an American neon sign company I started my business with Chris Radcliffe in 1992 central sign services we had some megalomania in our in our idea about starting a business so we wanted to call it central services right which we did we actually got the idea from the movie Brazil and yes my office is still there on the 22nd floor I keep my library there I do my paperwork there and uh you've been there you know it's it's a it's a great spot you know I'm very very fortunate to have it six owners of the building the new owner of the building is a super cool guy he understands the arts and I have the same deal with him that I had with the other five owners which is I keep the neon going for a pretty sweet deal in that building that is a sweet deal so when you guys drive past the Oakland Tribune building John's up there John's up there or the quarter San Francisco or the Hills Brothers we can thank John now this is a great segue to a question for Paul and Dee Dee if you guys can come on one of the questions that we had in the chat was this whole idea about why neon signs well what we hear people say is burnout but we never like to say the word burn with neon because they don't really burn out but what what does happen when they fail what causes that well there's so many causes of neon failure the most common one nowadays is that the transformers that are made are terrible awful I hate them the GFI's they put on them are awful and every sign I install that's new I say you know if this last a year we're doing good at the last five years you're doing great and at the last 20 I just worked on a sign the other day I put glass on it 1940 had the original transformers and it still works yep you betcha nowadays every year I get a call saying hey our signs broken it's always the transformers so mostly it's the transformers sometimes dirt mud junk get inside the housings and they can burn an electrode sometimes a burnt out sign what what they're calling a burnt out sign it's nothing more than that the mercury is cold and isn't circulating through the tubing and that's sometimes they put they put a drop of mercury in drop of mercury in and you roll it around so it vaporizes and it burns and that makes that particular that particular blue that it enhances it enhances the blue so what'll happen is sometimes you'll have a thing that says john in script and the top of the j will be dim and the OHN will be bright and people go hey my sign's burned out so you haven't you haven't blamed pigeons yet paul oh pigeons oh pigeons are terrible on signs they're so never meet a sign hanger or a sign service man who will profess to liking pigeons ever because they will actually land on the tube and even break it sometimes right no what happens is when when sloppy service guys will open up the access panels and they won't put them they either won't put them back at all or they won't put them back right and the pigeons go hey this is a nice dry cool place it's a perfect birdhouse until until the sign turns on and they get electrocuted and die and decompose inside the sign and layers and layers of dead and decomposing pigeons build up inside your sign cabinet but also they nest in them yeah up up to two I took I pulled as I mentioned earlier to you guys in the preliminary thing I pulled 255 gallon drums of pigeon detritus out of a nameless sign in the tenderline one time I I worked on the sign it got shipped to me from tanzas and they they sent me a picture and they had a chip and when I got it luckily the fronts the faces were forcing so they were good but the whole inside of it which was regular tin was eaten up by pigeon food and it just you could just pick pieces of the sign off and there was nothing left because the pigeons had rotted away so the so the decaying carcasses plus their urine and feces it all turns acidic and then in the presence of water moisture rain snow it accelerates the decomposition of the metal and so both Paul and John talked about how they both had to rebuild the metal signs they call cans the metal sign cans because over time the metal itself can can corrode and decay and rot out so there's a whole series of reasons we didn't even mention the wiring yet the wiring the installation eventually gets brittle and and so the the wiring can also fail there are a whole series of reasons why neon signs can fail but that said they can also just well succeed and not just and just last and last and last and last like we all know cosine has been there since what 40 at least 47 yeah we all know that the pigeons are malicious and we were going to give pigeons their dupe in this talk but you know if you stand under a sign missing some of the access panels if you stand long enough eventually you will see a pigeon stick his neck out get a look at the street every time i worked on a a sign on a roof here in los angeles and from the 1920s and the first thing i had to do with that sign was get a drumstick and pound on it for about half an hour not a bird drumstick again drumming yeah drumming drumstick i had to stick and pound on it to get all the birds out of it i'm going okay we have a question for amy and then after that there's one for didia so amy are you still there can you come on hi um some someone wants to know about that beautiful ribcage sculpture behind you oh thank you that's um a piece i made a couple years ago um i was i was kind of getting into making um interior body parts with neon and bones and stuff and um this piece right here um i had been at the time i was listening to this um intense podcast from the canadian broadcasting company um about consent and um it was just really vivid the way the person was describing the story of being touched without giving permission but not necessarily denying the person and it just um spoke to me and so this is kind of um my interpretation of it where it's just like a heart beating inside a ribcage yeah so so now that we can see a little bit better we see that flashing heart inside and yeah give us a little bit closer look that it's just beautiful how how long did it take to create that is that it's a time consuming all those bends yeah um for me like the um it's a little bit harder to do uh 3d which i don't know if you can tell on the screen but it's um there's three layers this is the um spinal column and then the heart and then the ribcage kind of curves around this way um so it's kind of you know usually as a sign maker you have a pattern that's in reverse and a screen on top and you bend the glass and place it on that pattern and it's all flat and then you pick it up and it's the correct um version of the sign but when you're doing 3d you kind of have to bend in space so um it's a little bit more tricky it took me i don't actually know how long it took me uh maybe um a week or so i guess well it really turned out beautiful and i i i also love neon has this quality that the light will be very different the light that's coming from it depending on the ambient light like it's just always changing as the light changes in the room um and actually some ambient light over here i've brought my um neon suitcase all right different colors that's wonderful uh this and is that what you would show potential um uh clients if you're going to make a custom piece for them yeah actually these days with especially with covid i found a couple websites that are pretty good at showing the color it's not exactly as good as seeing it in real life but if you're just communicating uh through email uh you can kind of get a gist of what color they want if you just show the give them the website and they can pick a color so but it's not as much fun as opening as opening it and so i just kind of want to point out this is a suitcase that you made that from scratch is that right amy yeah i wanted to mimic the old you know sign seller you know suitcase person going from door to door trying to sell neon and that's a great segue back to um paul and didi because you guys collect those sales salesman cases if i'm not mistaken well i guess we accumulate as many of them as we can find but they're pretty they're pretty hard to find um but i think we have i think we have four yeah we don't collect we just attach to and then keep using them well they are really cool and you guys have brought your your vintage ones when we've done live events at the tenderloin museum um the nice one we have is like a european one from the late 30s that's all covered in wool on the inside yeah i have to say oh wow paul and didi were so cool i guess about two years ago they actually drove up with this suitcase from the los angeles area to san francisco for an event we did at the tenderloin museum yeah no that was very cool um so we we're getting close to our our a lot of time but there is one kind of technical question um going back to history now and this was a very early in your presentation pondidia and that was about the patents that got bought out um make i believe it's daniel mcfarlane's yeah and so somebody want to know like how does that work how do you buy a patent for somebody else anything is for sale for the right amount of money and the right enticement so i'm sure because general electric was the one that bought the patents they just probably made them a really good deal they also hired that so general electric not only bought daniel mcfarlane more's patents um they also hired him um and he became head of their more lamp division so what they did was they sidelined his um his patents his technology um and his luminous tubing in order to they just um and this is fairly common corporately and general electric is notorious about it there are full books it's about general electric in their business practices in this time period they would you know it's all it's basically a hostile form of hostile takeover um with patents you can do that and that's and that's what that's one of the things that they did patents of course also expire in the length of a patent's life um has changed over the years so um like when george claude's patents expired that was a shorter time span than the time span we have now so it's um so it's um everyone thinks of um gaining a patent as this really great thing and it's yours forever and it's not so it's a it's a very competitive work environment especially in lighting technology in the early in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there's actually a friend of mine is working on a full book on the history of patents so it's a it's a whole separate area and also like songwriters don't really own their songs forever right right but also um around 1910 1912 when when ge bought him out um there were new technologies tungsten so the color of light from a light bulb was way better so he was starting to feel fresher and he wasn't doing as well right his technology was just a little bit past its peak so he wouldn't have necessarily been entirely opposed to being given another chance and a bigger laboratory and and a and a different podium okay i have a wrap up question for our session unless you've got something about patents i don't i don't own any patents all right so this is a question that came in for us but i actually want to ask it of all of you um and that was how did you fall in love with neon so i'll i would say for al and i we loved it since we were little kids it's something we really remembered um like john was saying it's like what's landmarks in the cities that we grew up in right and then we grew up and we met people like all of you so yeah we like a lot like a lot of photographers we set out to document the neon signs of san francisco in the sf neon book and then you become advocates for the things that you document but we didn't know that there's actually a whole world out there of and actually a national movement and we had no idea to appreciate um this particular art form whether it be art or signage so um let's just go let's go around so we'll go down to you amy next how did you fall in love with neon um i've always well actually i would say i have a love hate relationship with me but uh you know i didn't know until i went to art school that it was all handmade and then i got into it and i kind of um you know i was drawn to it because i could work on it as a you know i went to do i tried glass blowing and you need a partner and i really like the idea of of neon being like a singular loner kind of activity and then um as i said before i went and i tried to make art and in group shows and then it felt embarrassing that people were just drawn to because it lit up and then i honed my skills and you know i didn't have the internet so and people were really secretive about how they did neon like it was people wouldn't share information so i would like read signs of the times and spy on people and try to learn and figure it out and you know i kind of got my footing doing bombarding for a long time but um anyway um i'm back to loving neon and i i'm really into this book i mean it's just i love the exposés and you know the how terrible george claude was which i don't know we can talk about more of that if you want but anyway um all right or read the book and find out yeah read the book it's really good all right thank you thank you i want a long version and i want a hardcover there you go all right how about you john what's your love story question and the first time i really became aware of me and i'm sure of course i seen it around as a kid and whatnot but in 1978 i was in a group called the suicide club urban exploration group and we used to do pranks in street theater and climb around urban climbing and stuff like that and a good friend of mine who was in the group who later ended up becoming a noted architectural historian and he's a little bit shy about his name being used but he came up with this idea uh when the city of paris building on union square in san francisco they had a giant neon eichel tower on it and they were going to tear the bill and neiman marcus which you know i mean don't i have to be careful here i don't want to curse neiman marcus bought that building and we're going to tear it down completely and we're literally forced by architectural historians and local history groups to save the rotunda in the building and move it forward as an architectural element in the doorway to the building forced to do it and then later of course the those people took credit for that as though it's some idea that they had anyway before this all happened they were going to tear the building down and so my friend had this idea and he got he conscripted his friends in this group this urban explorers group and he made a giant banner that said save the city and we climbed up on top of the building and we hung this banner from the top of the neon this neon eichel tower down to the corner of the building so it said save the city call and we had diane feinstein's home phone number okay somebody got it somehow and it was called the mayor and we put it up there it made the papers and it was anonymous nobody ever knew who did it and and and while climbing that was a climber and while climbing on this eichel tower i just realized it was a you know neon like wow this is crazy look at this thing and it just stuck in my mind and later when i had the opportunity to join the neon trades it was that was one of the big reasons that i developed an interest in it you had a very intimate like physical introduction to the beauty of neon that's great thank you john and thank you for joining us really appreciate you having me thanks john thank you for having me i'm honored to see you again yeah all right we're circling up to the authors go ahead you're first no you're first no you're no you're first you can keep it a second it can take you 47 paulk well okay i'm first um for me neon was always evocative of the 1930s and i was always a a history omnivore um and one day probably in about 1976 i was driving down one of the main streets in um in Los Angeles and there was a place that said custom neon i went really that's interesting so i walked in there i met the guy that owned it was the glass vendor and got to be friends with him around that time somebody said to me i was making jewelry and somebody said you make great jewelry can you make us a sign i went do you want a neon sign they went sure why not so i made them a neon sign and um it was kind of a what we would now call an out-of-the-box type of sign and it yeah and it became real well known and so people started asking me to do more and uh i've been doing it ever since and i still haven't gotten good at it uh some other people might beg to differ paulk i don't agree with him well i got interested because i fell in love with paulk so he was one of our earliest dates um in 1986 was um he was he was repairing a neon sign um on the front of a chinese restaurant and i was you know hanging out and um we crawled through the attic to the front where the sign was um and i just thought this was the coolest thing i just thought i just was completely fascinated by seeing how it worked um seeing how he repaired it and that's that's where it started it's your fault it's my fault wow it's always his fault yeah okay well um that is a great wrap-up question whoever asked it and again we're just plugging the book um i think you'll really love it it is compact and wonderful you guys did an amazing job squeezing this history into very easy to read format and the morning you know we we it was a partnership between the four of us because um that the the text began with design in mind so we were working with randall ann and al from the very beginning in how to conceptualize everything and then all the way through um and and their their design is key to the way that the concepts and the ideas come across so and thank you for all the all the visual research too yeah i think people should know the the level of or the the amount of research that you've done and the traveling you know all the all the shoe leather and the plane rides and you know it's just that it's years and years and years of research and knowledge that you put into that book and it really shows we want to give a little um a big thank you to sfpl for having us tonight it sounds like that they have books on order to place on library shelves or or no to sell through the um um through the library website so that so order 18 on order that you can place on hold for circulation array okay and check it out or you can buy it from all those locations that were mentioned yeah tindaline museum um it's definitely another one and so we were going to go out tonight um with a little teaser for the cinematic um san francisco neon event and this is a homage to neon and film that alan i well we just painstakingly i guess we need an obsessive well after we did our book we needed to do something else with neon so this was it this was it this isn't yeah the short version yeah and so so we'll this is a little two minute film um that really shows you in some ways we think of it the history of neon where it started as as glamorous and then slowly in film you can see that neon um became less than glamorous and actually uh there's a little bit of um honor murder in mayhem um and it's and it's where neon is actually really sort of doing the work for the cinematographer um and we're going to go over this in detail in the cinematic s of neon okay i gotta find it here it is and we appreciate everybody showing up tonight that's it yeah okay here is stolen moments thank you everybody it was a great evening thanks right did it make you hungry uh-uh thirsty sure feel it brave let's go to fishing before i'll order a meal that'll last you for a week right thanks po and didi i thanks amy thanks john and thank you to the ssf right thank you lisa and anisa thanks so much for having us thank you everybody and library community we uh thank you for being here tonight and definitely tune in july and august for sf neon returns everyone neon take care neon sleep well everyone thank you