Las Vegas Must See: The Neon Museum

And we continue with our American Stories, and we’ve told stories from many of the museums across this great country. Today we have Aaron Berger, executive director of the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, the capital of neon, to share the history of Las Vegas and the iconic signage associated with it.

A unique aspect of signage is that in many cases, the building itself doesn’t own the sign. Even if it’s attached to the building, it’s actually leased by the sign maker. And so the sign maker actually owns that piece of property. And so you can raze a building, but the sign often goes back to the original sign maker. And they have what’s called a boneyard, which is a place for them to pull parts, pull neon tubing, pull…
…lights, pull mechanics.

And so these concerned citizens in ’96 started meeting with various sign makers and saying, “You know, we’d like to make sure that these parts of history don’t necessarily get used to create new signage, but we actually save the original pieces themselves.” It’s fascinating to me to be able to tell the story of history using such an unusual medium, right? So we’re using outdoor signage to tell you the story of Las Vegas history. It took until 2012 for us to actually open our facility in our current space, which is on Las Vegas Boulevard. We’re a little under three acres of property.

We have four physical components to the Neon Museum.

The first, that it’s hard to say it’s my favorite but I’d say it’s probably my favorite, is actually the physical building, the lobby that you enter.

It’s called La Conca, which means the shell.

It was designed by an architect named Paul Revere Williams. Paul Revere Williams was the first Black architect to be accepted…
…into the AIA. He designed this piece of architecture.

It looks like a seashell, but it was designed to try and attract people off the roadway, to be this sort of unusual enough looking building that someone would actually pull off the road and say, “I want to see this.”

So that’s our lobby. We get a chance to tell a little bit about Paul Revere Williams’s contributions.

This is mid-century, a time where some people would maybe not feel comfortable sitting next to a Black man, even though he’s your architect, and even though he’s an architect who’s building the homes of Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra.

So he really learned how…
…to draw out designs upside down so that people could sit on the other side of the desk from him and still understand his designs. So I think that’s a unique part of history and an important part of kind of setting the stage of when you come to the Neon Museum.

That’s the first step. Second step is the Neon Boneyard.

So the Boneyard again refers to the concept of what sign makers have, which is again a space that they go into to pull parts and use for the recreation of new signage. We have curated our Boneyard so that it is a very thoughtful and logical tour through everything from small businesses to casinos, the Strip, motels, and really gives you sort of a walk through Las Vegas history. One of the things that was really striking to me as a visitor is as you tour the Boneyard, you’re given an insight into the Black experience by being shown the Moulon Rouge sign. The Moulon Rouge was a casino that, while it lived for a short period of time, was the first integrated hotel in Las Vegas. So if you had someone like Aretha Franklin or Sammy Davis Jr. who would perform on the Strip, they would do these great shows. They would, of course, pack the house, but they weren’t allowed to stay in those hotels. So the Moulon Rouge became a place for both Black and white visitors to stay.

It was often a 2:30 in the morning show.

So after Aretha Franklin had done two shows again on the Strip, she would do a third show at the Moulon Rouge for the people staying there.

So we have that amazing sign.

We have the story of women. We have the story of the Indigenous people from…
…Las Vegas and the Las Vegas area.

We have the story of Latinx community, the LGBT community. All of these stories are conveyed as you walk through and learn a little bit about the sign that you’re seeing. The third is the Brilliant Show. A few years ago, we contracted with an artist whose name is Craig Winslow. We have a gallery that has no electricity going to the signage at all. These signs are largely to a point where they are beyond conservation; there’s nothing we can really do to bring them back to life. So Craig has developed, through a process called projection mapping, two large towers that pinpoint light onto these, for lack of a better word, dead signs, and he brings them back to life. And when I say pinpoint, it really is looking at each individual light bulb and seeing that light bulb begin to flicker and come back to life. He does it to sort of an iconic Las Vegas soundtrack, so you’ll hear everything from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga to, of course, Elvis, and bringing back all of these incredible signs in a great 25-minute experience. And then the fourth aspect is what’s outside the museum walls. So we have awhere a dozen pieces of our collection that adorn different parts of Downtown Las Vegas.

So through South Las Vegas Boulevard.

You’ll see signage that’s out there: the Silver Slipper, you’ll see motel signs, you’ll see wonderful pieces that are just really fantastic, and they’re all part of our collection. But it’s in partnership with the city that you can take advantage and kind of revel in those pieces as well. So neon signs, really, I think their heyday was in the ’50s. We have examples dating back to as early as the ’30s in our collection.

But, you know, the…
…basis of neon is to use electricity to draw someone’s attention.

I think the…
…reason Las Vegas is such an epicenter for neon is that all of our—whether it’s the gaming industry, the casinos, the attractions that we have, the restaurants—we’re all vying…
…for someone’s attention.

And so this combination of neon lights added to flashing light bulbs, added to, you know, these glimmering kind of stars and shines, this is what sort of attracts the person to come in off the street and check out this location versus the location next door. So the signage is critical in a town like Las Vegas. I mean, it’s what’s going to bring someone in. You know, in the ’30s we were dealing with Prohibition at that point. The oldest sign we have in our collection is one from the Green Shack, and it is a restaurant. We know that it’s from the ’30s, but we know it’s also from after Prohibition because they’re promoting cocktails.

You know, Las Vegas sort of…
…bloomed from people coming from the West Coast to Las Vegas or from Los Angeles coming through town, and so the city sort of developed as a result of that, of trying to get people off the road and have a chance to come and spend the night, to take advantage of…
…all the things that are offered.

But it was also a place as the Hoover Dam was being built. It was also a place where people would come to see the Hoover Dam, to see this architectural marvel. There was, of course, a need for the workers who were working at the dam to have places to go and enjoy after an incredibly long day of work.

So the Green Shack is a great example of that.

We have over 850 signs in our permanent collection on display. We have about 250 signs that are out in the actual Boneyard or in the North Gallery, and then at night we illuminate about two dozen signs. The reason that we illuminate just that 24 or so is because, a, if we were to illuminate everything, you would get a really great sunburn.

B, you would sort of get…
…lost and you wouldn’t be able to really appreciate any one sign in particular.

So, newest acquisition that’s just come in…
…We’ve just accepted the Planet Hollywood sign. So this is an incredibly iconic globe that is 25 feet across, weighs somewhere in the range of about 13,000 pounds, and it opened in ’90…
…4 outside Caesars Palace on the Strip.

And when the opening took place, there were 10,000 people in stadium seats outside to watch the stars arrive…
…for the opening of this restaurant. So, including, and it wasn’t just stars—I mean, George and Barbara Bush came to the opening of this, of the restaurant.

The signs are again, they’re a catalyst, right? They’re what starts the conversation. What excites me is when people tell me about staying at the Moulon Rouge or their experience, you know, if they were one of the 10,000 standing outside waiting to see the next celebrity at Planet Hollywood. So those types of things, those stories, we love to collect as well. So we do programs, certainly, that are educational by nature. We want people to come in and learn a lot more and take a deeper dive into some of our stories. But we do weddings, we do album covers, photoshoots for everything from TV shows to the cover of magazines. So it is, there is no place truly on Earth like the Neon Museum. It’s a great way to just, I don’t know, immerse yourself in Las Vegas’s heyday.

The story of the Neon Museum. Here on our American Stories.