by matt » Tue Apr 12, 2022 12:59 pm
second edit with feedback included
Millions of neon signs, sometimes pallid, sometimes brash, are still significant letters of the global urban alphabet, ever shimmering in the shadows and whispering a ballad about who we still are, who we are not anymore, and who we might become. -- Being and Neonness by Luis de Miranda
A young man, chatting with the proprietor of a tropical fish store, expressed astonishment at the number of fish sold every week. "You see the big neon sign out front?" the proprietor asked. "Well, I got to sell a lot of fish to keep it going."
-- The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, 1948.
Neon -- like black clothing and punk -- always seems to be making a comeback. There are few materials that appear in public space as capable of instantly evoking a particular type of attitude and ambience, of casting a certain type of light, literally and figuratively, on both the realm of the street and the interior world of the places we think of as `downtown.'
Yet neon signs are also suffused with a strange ambiguity. We read them as a way of demarcating that which is cool, while also evoking a chapter of an urban past that is rapidly receding. But which chapter? And does neon evoke `authentic' memories or merely an earlier layer of nostalgic signaling that was itself directed at something even further away?
It might seem that irony and nostalgia are wavelengths that would cancel one another out, and yet the weird physics of neon light somehow permits those two stances to co-exist.
* * *
On October 1, 1929, less than a month before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, a curious notice appeared in the Toronto Star's business section, tucked next to an ad for Burberry top coats and the latest earnings reports. Addressed to "those who buy electric signs and those who buy stocks," the notice itemized companies in the U.S. and Canada that had apparently infringed on French patents held by the Claude Neon Companies, which gave the firm and its licensees exclusive rights to make and sell these distinctive electric signs. The Canadian subsidiary was incorporated in Montreal in 1927 and its shares traded publicly.
In Toronto, the local distributor was called Claude Neon-Macey, and its offices were located at 73 Elm Street, half a block west of Bay Street in The Ward. The none-too-subtle message was that companies (and their investors) that are buying neon signs would be well advised to purchase them from an authorized source rather than interlopers such as the Brilliant Tube Sign Co. or the Fluxlume Sign Co., both targets of lawsuits. Claude Neon at about the same time made an even more assertive move to control the local ad market, acquiring the well-known Toronto billboard sign company, E.L. Ruddy Company Ltd. Neon marquees and billboards popped up all across the city during the 1930s.
These machinations open a window into the latest epic clash involving electricity and electric light, technologies that had radically re-shaped cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over a period of a few decades, Thomas Edison's electric light had muscled aside gaslight and (for a time) Nikolai Tesla's AC. Eventually, Edison's incandescent bulbs replaced the harshly monochromatic electric "arc" lights that initially illuminated urban main streets.
Then, in 1898, a pair of British scientists who had been tinkering with Geissler vacuum tubes happened upon a technique for generating a red glow by injecting neon gas (as well as argon and krypton). Within about a decade, Georges Claude, a French engineer, commercialized their discovery by inventing neon lights, which would soon be installed around Paris. Claude's product electrified urban-dwellers, and the popularity of neon as a core component of signage spread rapidly to big cities around the world.
Luis de Miranda, a French philosopher and author of Being and Neonness, describes those first wave neon signs as a "time capsule sent to us from before the First World War." The reality is far less lyrical: because neon did a great job communicating basic commercial information in public space, these signs became incredibly popular with retailers. Indeed, the earliest Toronto example I have found dates to 1914. It was a tall overhead sign installed on the east side of Victoria Street, north of Queen, and belonged to the Underwood Typewriter Co.
Neon signage also seemed to accumulate in certain parts of cities -- high traffic areas like Times Square in New York or Piccadilly Circus in London. These were the places where the relentless oneupsmanship of outdoor advertising combined with the clustering of theatres or night clubs to create extraordinary outdoor rooms, places literally crackling -- neon's distinctive buzz -- with the transgressive exuberance of city life.
Along the way, the production of neon signs -- which is complex because it involves heating and bending glass tubes -- became specialized and then stylized. For instance, in Hong Kong, which had a dense profusion of neon signage, Art Deco became a dominant leitmotif, according to Brian Sze-Hang Kwok, a professor of design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
During the Depression," noted the writer Joseph Gustaitis in a 2000 essay entitled, Neon: A Light History, "neon conquered Times Square and the rest of the United States as the country entered the Great Depression." He cites eye-popping examples, such as a six-storey high toothpaste ad featuring a young woman on a swing. "In 1936, indefatigable advertiser William Wrigley's chewing gum company built the largest sign ever erected in Times Square, a neon aquarium display eight stories high and a block long, with huge fish swimming serenely though an iridescent sea while blowing colossal bubbles."
Yet after World War II, the phenomena of neon signage seemed to head off on two seemingly opposite tracks. It entirely defined sin cities like the Las Vegas strip or the red-light district in Amsterdam. Yet Ryerson University communication scholar Carolyn Kane, author "Electrographic Architecture" points out that neon also acquired its moody, Noir-ish identity as post-war car culture and white flight began to drain life out of traditional downtowns.
"Actual neon seemed left behind in inner-city ghettos," she observes. "Estranged immigrants and disenfranchised peoples moved in alongside the abandoned neon signs, some no longer working, or half-lit at best. Herein, flickering neon accrued a new signification as a symbol of social and urban decline." In Times Square, meanwhile, those flashing neon signs were pressed into service promoting peep shows and sex shops. By the 1970s, Kane says, neon came to be associated with a kind of "desolation" denoting the decline of the American city -- a vibe that was perfectly rendered in Ridley Scott's dystopian, neon-saturated Los Angeles.
* * *
Some of Toronto's most memorable and distinctive neon signs were found on the marquees of grand movie houses, like the Eglinton or the Uptown (originally a Loew's vaudeville venue), as well as burlesque theatres like the Victory, the Casino, or the Lux.
Yet you don't need to be an expert in local history to know that Toronto's main neon sign zones are, or were, Chinatown and the Yonge Street strip. The Spadina/Dundas Chinatown, which teemed with neon for decades, is, of course, the second Chinatown. The first was where Nathan Phillips Square is today. Its buildings were low slung, and non-descript; the area didn't really try to draw attention to itself because of prevalent racist sentiment. As Chinatown's restaurants became more popular in the 1940s and then migrated west along Dundas, the signage grew denser, brighter and more emblematic of a specific district (see Chapter TK).
The Yonge Street strip was a vibrant spine of commerce and entertainment since the 1910s, a perpetually busy arterial that attracted night life in a city whose ethic discouraged and regulated fun. Its anchor was the seven-storey Loew's, which could hold 3,500 people.
"By night," writes historian Daniel Ross in The Heart of Toronto, "the theatre's flashing marquees were the brightest spots on an electric street fed by Ontario's plentiful, cheap hydroelectric power. Contemporary photographs show a streetscape aglow with the light of triple-globed streetlamps, shop signs, and flashing cigarette billboards." The east-west cross-streets, Ross adds, had none of Yonge's vitality.
Torontonians casually refer to the Yonge strip's "heyday" but there were several: the pre-WWII decades; the post-war period, when Yonge's music and night club scene flourished; and then the strange period from the early 1970s on, when the Eaton Centre drained the strip of its retail, the City cancelled the short-lived pedestrian mall, and local politicians hustled to `clean up' the area's perceived seediness following the 1977 rape and murder of Emanuel Jaques, a shoeshine boy lured into a massage parlour near Yonge and Gerrard.
Neon illuminated all three eras, although the strongest current association -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- accrues to the last period, as exemplified by the luminous signage of the strip's three most iconic addresses: Massey Hall, the Zanzibar Tavern strip club and Sam The Record Man, whose twinned flashing LPs may have been as closely bound to Toronto's identity as the CN Tower and Viljo Revel's City Hall. The memory of that time is saturated not just by the glow of neon, but also by the warmth of the technicolour hues of photographs from that period, says Kane. "Film and photography in the 1970s still had that that the saturated yellow, which begins to die out in the 1980s, which, ironically, coincides with Ronald Reagan and this kind of money era." But, as she adds, "The nostalgia is real for different generations, for different reasons."
* * *
On the evening of June 13, 2019, tens of thousands of Torontonians, dire-hard basketball fans and band-wagoneers alike, surged down Yonge Street and into Dundas Square to celebrate the Raptor's astonishing NBA championship win. Over many giddy hours, the exuberant celebration crystalized into countless flashbulb impressions, which in turn fed that ineffable phenomenon of city life: collective memory.
The densely brilliant signage that encircles Dundas Square is part of this picture, of course, but there was no authentic neon that night to add its own brand of electric atmosphere. The Yonge strip has changed a lot, too. In the 20 years between the late 1990s and the Raptors' victory, retail began to come back. The theatres got facelifts. The gap where the storied Colonial Tavern stood turned into the glass podium of a condo tower. The Sam's block vanished to make way for Snøhetta's shimmering Ryerson student centre. In the latter 2010s, developers snapped up most of the block between Gould and Gerrard, leaving masonry facades, a few noodle joints and the Zanzibar, with its neon stars, gold-painted brick, and a marquee that promised, during the pandemic, that its dancers were both "vaxxed n waxed."
What of the area's two other emblematic neon signs?
During Massey Hall's big renovation, the marquee over the main entrance was put into storage in 2018, repaired (though not rebuilt) and then reinstalled in November, 2021, when the venue re-opened. The sign's familiarly lurid red glow is, if anything, more declarative than ever, given that the hall has undergone a complex renovation that both restored the interior decor to its original splendor while modernizing the back-end so it can provide better accessibility, more bathrooms and decent spaces for having drinks at intermission. The Massey Hall sign, in other words, has not passed into the past. It is still doing its workaday job.
The Sam's sign has had a very different afterlife, but also an intriguing backstory. The Yonge strip's original record store was actually A&A's Records and Tapes, at 351 Yonge. It was established initially as a book store in the late 1940s by siblings Alice and Aaron Kenner. They soon branched into LPs. In the early 1960s, Sam Sniderman, who had a record store on College, moved in two doors south, and the pair promptly transformed that stretch into a destination for young people looking for music. In what became a well known retail feud, the two retailers competed vigorously for customers and also for sheer visibility, engaging in what became a two-decade-long "neon rivalry," as Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume put it. On the strength of their profile, both franchised but soon collapsed, although Sam's held out longer.
After Ryerson bought the Sam's corner, then-president Sheldon Levy promised to save the sign, much in the way he'd executed a wildly improbable plan to prevent Loblaws from turning Maple Leaf Gardens into a condo. The Sam's discs proved to be an almost equally difficult salvage operation. There was no guarantee that the sign itself, heavily rusted and difficult to dismantle, could actually be re-assembled and re-hung. Nor was it clear, at least initially, where it would go if it could be saved.
After several years of false starts, the Sam's sign was finally installed on the top of an unprepossessing glass office building at Victoria and Dundas that belongs to Toronto Public Health. There was an official lighting ceremony, one cold night in January, 2018, captured by on a CBC TV News clip, which showed the double-LP overlooking Dundas Square, albeit from a half-block remove, hovering way above both the plane of the street and the elevation of all the digital screens. The reality, in fact, is that Sam's rotating neon disks, originally intended to dominate the street and draw in customers, are little more than a nearly invisible relic, a sign without anything to signify.
Mark Garner, the executive director of the Downtown Yonge BIA, has been trying to fill the space between living and dead neon by collecting neon signs with an eye to establishing a neon museum of Toronto. He's got about 30 so far, everything from the original Licks sign to various ones for beer and cigarettes, as well as the Canary Diner marquee. "I know where the Gasworks sign is," he told me.
Garner has organized some pop-up displays of the collection, but his plan is for something more permanent, either a bricks-and-mortar museum modeled on the American Sign Museum, in Cincinnati, or even something outdoors. "We had planned to use Victoria laneway, which goes from Shuter Street into Ryerson campus as our laneway activation," he says, noting that David Mirvish may re-mount part of the Honest Ed's sign nearby. While an outdoor neon sign collection sounds like a good idea, and certainly more organic than some kind of retro tourist trap, Garner hasn't managed to talk the owners of the buildings that back on to the alley to say yes. And, as he adds (predictably), "I'd have to go to city council and then get them to approve the neon to be hung because of the bylaws."
How should one think about this kind of heritage preservation?
On the one hand, there's no doubt that neon signage can be understood as a legitimate form of craftsmanship, with its own artistry, techniques and abundant cultural references, the tendrils of which thread through film, music, visual art, advertising and industrial design.
On the other hand, it's also possible to approach a modest collection of locally sourced neon entirely ironically -- the opportunistic re-marketing of kitsch, presented as ersatz art, for $20 a visit, plus the selfies and the T-shirts from the gift store at the exit.
But perhaps there's a third way, one that emerges from neon's uniquely evocative place in the visual language of 20th century cities. Neon reminds us that in both cities and in life, the past and present travel together, forever goading and seducing one another, all while underscoring the perennial struggle between authentic and inauthentic urban experience.
Indeed, when we look at a neon sign, and consider what associations it evokes, do we feel nostalgic about our own past, or some conjured past that belonged to -- and was then burnished by -- a previous generation that passed through these same spaces?
In this light, neon casts off the peculiar glow of those questions that have no answers.
CTA Notation: "Item is a photograph of a rooftop billboard atop a building on the west side of Victoria Street, north of Queen Street East. View is looking north-west from Queen Street East. Visible is a neon over-hanging sign advertising Underwood typewriters." Goad's 1913 atlas, however, shows that Underwood was located at 90 Richmond East.
second edit with feedback included
[i]Millions of neon signs, sometimes pallid, sometimes brash, are still significant letters of the global urban alphabet, ever shimmering in the shadows and whispering a ballad about who we still are, who we are not anymore, and who we might become. -- Being and Neonness by Luis de Miranda
A young man, chatting with the proprietor of a tropical fish store, expressed astonishment at the number of fish sold every week. "You see the big neon sign out front?" the proprietor asked. "Well, I got to sell a lot of fish to keep it going."
-- The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, 1948.[/i]
Neon -- like black clothing and punk -- always seems to be making a comeback. There are few materials that appear in public space as capable of instantly evoking a particular type of attitude and ambience, of casting a certain type of light, literally and figuratively, on both the realm of the street and the interior world of the places we think of as `downtown.'
Yet neon signs are also suffused with a strange ambiguity. We read them as a way of demarcating that which is cool, while also evoking a chapter of an urban past that is rapidly receding. But which chapter? And does neon evoke `authentic' memories or merely an earlier layer of nostalgic signaling that was itself directed at something even further away?
It might seem that irony and nostalgia are wavelengths that would cancel one another out, and yet the weird physics of neon light somehow permits those two stances to co-exist.
* * *
On October 1, 1929, less than a month before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, a curious notice appeared in the Toronto Star's business section, tucked next to an ad for Burberry top coats and the latest earnings reports. Addressed to "those who buy electric signs and those who buy stocks," the notice itemized companies in the U.S. and Canada that had apparently infringed on French patents held by the Claude Neon Companies, which gave the firm and its licensees exclusive rights to make and sell these distinctive electric signs. The Canadian subsidiary was incorporated in Montreal in 1927 and its shares traded publicly.
In Toronto, the local distributor was called Claude Neon-Macey, and its offices were located at 73 Elm Street, half a block west of Bay Street in The Ward. The none-too-subtle message was that companies (and their investors) that are buying neon signs would be well advised to purchase them from an authorized source rather than interlopers such as the Brilliant Tube Sign Co. or the Fluxlume Sign Co., both targets of lawsuits. Claude Neon at about the same time made an even more assertive move to control the local ad market, acquiring the well-known Toronto billboard sign company, E.L. Ruddy Company Ltd. Neon marquees and billboards popped up all across the city during the 1930s.
These machinations open a window into the latest epic clash involving electricity and electric light, technologies that had radically re-shaped cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over a period of a few decades, Thomas Edison's electric light had muscled aside gaslight and (for a time) Nikolai Tesla's AC. Eventually, Edison's incandescent bulbs replaced the harshly monochromatic electric "arc" lights that initially illuminated urban main streets.
Then, in 1898, a pair of British scientists who had been tinkering with Geissler vacuum tubes happened upon a technique for generating a red glow by injecting neon gas (as well as argon and krypton). Within about a decade, Georges Claude, a French engineer, commercialized their discovery by inventing neon lights, which would soon be installed around Paris. Claude's product electrified urban-dwellers, and the popularity of neon as a core component of signage spread rapidly to big cities around the world.
Luis de Miranda, a French philosopher and author of Being and Neonness, describes those first wave neon signs as a "time capsule sent to us from before the First World War." The reality is far less lyrical: because neon did a great job communicating basic commercial information in public space, these signs became incredibly popular with retailers. Indeed, the earliest Toronto example I have found dates to 1914. It was a tall overhead sign installed on the east side of Victoria Street, north of Queen, and belonged to the Underwood Typewriter Co.
Neon signage also seemed to accumulate in certain parts of cities -- high traffic areas like Times Square in New York or Piccadilly Circus in London. These were the places where the relentless oneupsmanship of outdoor advertising combined with the clustering of theatres or night clubs to create extraordinary outdoor rooms, places literally crackling -- neon's distinctive buzz -- with the transgressive exuberance of city life.
Along the way, the production of neon signs -- which is complex because it involves heating and bending glass tubes -- became specialized and then stylized. For instance, in Hong Kong, which had a dense profusion of neon signage, Art Deco became a dominant leitmotif, according to Brian Sze-Hang Kwok, a professor of design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
During the Depression," noted the writer Joseph Gustaitis in a 2000 essay entitled, Neon: A Light History, "neon conquered Times Square and the rest of the United States as the country entered the Great Depression." He cites eye-popping examples, such as a six-storey high toothpaste ad featuring a young woman on a swing. "In 1936, indefatigable advertiser William Wrigley's chewing gum company built the largest sign ever erected in Times Square, a neon aquarium display eight stories high and a block long, with huge fish swimming serenely though an iridescent sea while blowing colossal bubbles."
Yet after World War II, the phenomena of neon signage seemed to head off on two seemingly opposite tracks. It entirely defined sin cities like the Las Vegas strip or the red-light district in Amsterdam. Yet Ryerson University communication scholar Carolyn Kane, author "Electrographic Architecture" points out that neon also acquired its moody, Noir-ish identity as post-war car culture and white flight began to drain life out of traditional downtowns.
"Actual neon seemed left behind in inner-city ghettos," she observes. "Estranged immigrants and disenfranchised peoples moved in alongside the abandoned neon signs, some no longer working, or half-lit at best. Herein, flickering neon accrued a new signification as a symbol of social and urban decline." In Times Square, meanwhile, those flashing neon signs were pressed into service promoting peep shows and sex shops. By the 1970s, Kane says, neon came to be associated with a kind of "desolation" denoting the decline of the American city -- a vibe that was perfectly rendered in Ridley Scott's dystopian, neon-saturated Los Angeles.
* * *
Some of Toronto's most memorable and distinctive neon signs were found on the marquees of grand movie houses, like the Eglinton or the Uptown (originally a Loew's vaudeville venue), as well as burlesque theatres like the Victory, the Casino, or the Lux.
Yet you don't need to be an expert in local history to know that Toronto's main neon sign zones are, or were, Chinatown and the Yonge Street strip. The Spadina/Dundas Chinatown, which teemed with neon for decades, is, of course, the second Chinatown. The first was where Nathan Phillips Square is today. Its buildings were low slung, and non-descript; the area didn't really try to draw attention to itself because of prevalent racist sentiment. As Chinatown's restaurants became more popular in the 1940s and then migrated west along Dundas, the signage grew denser, brighter and more emblematic of a specific district (see Chapter TK).
The Yonge Street strip was a vibrant spine of commerce and entertainment since the 1910s, a perpetually busy arterial that attracted night life in a city whose ethic discouraged and regulated fun. Its anchor was the seven-storey Loew's, which could hold 3,500 people.
"By night," writes historian Daniel Ross in The Heart of Toronto, "the theatre's flashing marquees were the brightest spots on an electric street fed by Ontario's plentiful, cheap hydroelectric power. Contemporary photographs show a streetscape aglow with the light of triple-globed streetlamps, shop signs, and flashing cigarette billboards." The east-west cross-streets, Ross adds, had none of Yonge's vitality.
Torontonians casually refer to the Yonge strip's "heyday" but there were several: the pre-WWII decades; the post-war period, when Yonge's music and night club scene flourished; and then the strange period from the early 1970s on, when the Eaton Centre drained the strip of its retail, the City cancelled the short-lived pedestrian mall, and local politicians hustled to `clean up' the area's perceived seediness following the 1977 rape and murder of Emanuel Jaques, a shoeshine boy lured into a massage parlour near Yonge and Gerrard.
Neon illuminated all three eras, although the strongest current association -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- accrues to the last period, as exemplified by the luminous signage of the strip's three most iconic addresses: Massey Hall, the Zanzibar Tavern strip club and Sam The Record Man, whose twinned flashing LPs may have been as closely bound to Toronto's identity as the CN Tower and Viljo Revel's City Hall. The memory of that time is saturated not just by the glow of neon, but also by the warmth of the technicolour hues of photographs from that period, says Kane. "Film and photography in the 1970s still had that that the saturated yellow, which begins to die out in the 1980s, which, ironically, coincides with Ronald Reagan and this kind of money era." But, as she adds, "The nostalgia is real for different generations, for different reasons."
* * *
On the evening of June 13, 2019, tens of thousands of Torontonians, dire-hard basketball fans and band-wagoneers alike, surged down Yonge Street and into Dundas Square to celebrate the Raptor's astonishing NBA championship win. Over many giddy hours, the exuberant celebration crystalized into countless flashbulb impressions, which in turn fed that ineffable phenomenon of city life: collective memory.
The densely brilliant signage that encircles Dundas Square is part of this picture, of course, but there was no authentic neon that night to add its own brand of electric atmosphere. The Yonge strip has changed a lot, too. In the 20 years between the late 1990s and the Raptors' victory, retail began to come back. The theatres got facelifts. The gap where the storied Colonial Tavern stood turned into the glass podium of a condo tower. The Sam's block vanished to make way for Snøhetta's shimmering Ryerson student centre. In the latter 2010s, developers snapped up most of the block between Gould and Gerrard, leaving masonry facades, a few noodle joints and the Zanzibar, with its neon stars, gold-painted brick, and a marquee that promised, during the pandemic, that its dancers were both "vaxxed n waxed."
What of the area's two other emblematic neon signs?
During Massey Hall's big renovation, the marquee over the main entrance was put into storage in 2018, repaired (though not rebuilt) and then reinstalled in November, 2021, when the venue re-opened. The sign's familiarly lurid red glow is, if anything, more declarative than ever, given that the hall has undergone a complex renovation that both restored the interior decor to its original splendor while modernizing the back-end so it can provide better accessibility, more bathrooms and decent spaces for having drinks at intermission. The Massey Hall sign, in other words, has not passed into the past. It is still doing its workaday job.
The Sam's sign has had a very different afterlife, but also an intriguing backstory. The Yonge strip's original record store was actually A&A's Records and Tapes, at 351 Yonge. It was established initially as a book store in the late 1940s by siblings Alice and Aaron Kenner. They soon branched into LPs. In the early 1960s, Sam Sniderman, who had a record store on College, moved in two doors south, and the pair promptly transformed that stretch into a destination for young people looking for music. In what became a well known retail feud, the two retailers competed vigorously for customers and also for sheer visibility, engaging in what became a two-decade-long "neon rivalry," as Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume put it. On the strength of their profile, both franchised but soon collapsed, although Sam's held out longer.
After Ryerson bought the Sam's corner, then-president Sheldon Levy promised to save the sign, much in the way he'd executed a wildly improbable plan to prevent Loblaws from turning Maple Leaf Gardens into a condo. The Sam's discs proved to be an almost equally difficult salvage operation. There was no guarantee that the sign itself, heavily rusted and difficult to dismantle, could actually be re-assembled and re-hung. Nor was it clear, at least initially, where it would go if it could be saved.
After several years of false starts, the Sam's sign was finally installed on the top of an unprepossessing glass office building at Victoria and Dundas that belongs to Toronto Public Health. There was an official lighting ceremony, one cold night in January, 2018, captured by on a CBC TV News clip, which showed the double-LP overlooking Dundas Square, albeit from a half-block remove, hovering way above both the plane of the street and the elevation of all the digital screens. The reality, in fact, is that Sam's rotating neon disks, originally intended to dominate the street and draw in customers, are little more than a nearly invisible relic, a sign without anything to signify.
Mark Garner, the executive director of the Downtown Yonge BIA, has been trying to fill the space between living and dead neon by collecting neon signs with an eye to establishing a neon museum of Toronto. He's got about 30 so far, everything from the original Licks sign to various ones for beer and cigarettes, as well as the Canary Diner marquee. "I know where the Gasworks sign is," he told me.
Garner has organized some pop-up displays of the collection, but his plan is for something more permanent, either a bricks-and-mortar museum modeled on the American Sign Museum, in Cincinnati, or even something outdoors. "We had planned to use Victoria laneway, which goes from Shuter Street into Ryerson campus as our laneway activation," he says, noting that David Mirvish may re-mount part of the Honest Ed's sign nearby. While an outdoor neon sign collection sounds like a good idea, and certainly more organic than some kind of retro tourist trap, Garner hasn't managed to talk the owners of the buildings that back on to the alley to say yes. And, as he adds (predictably), "I'd have to go to city council and then get them to approve the neon to be hung because of the bylaws."
How should one think about this kind of heritage preservation?
On the one hand, there's no doubt that neon signage can be understood as a legitimate form of craftsmanship, with its own artistry, techniques and abundant cultural references, the tendrils of which thread through film, music, visual art, advertising and industrial design.
On the other hand, it's also possible to approach a modest collection of locally sourced neon entirely ironically -- the opportunistic re-marketing of kitsch, presented as ersatz art, for $20 a visit, plus the selfies and the T-shirts from the gift store at the exit.
But perhaps there's a third way, one that emerges from neon's uniquely evocative place in the visual language of 20th century cities. Neon reminds us that in both cities and in life, the past and present travel together, forever goading and seducing one another, all while underscoring the perennial struggle between authentic and inauthentic urban experience.
Indeed, when we look at a neon sign, and consider what associations it evokes, do we feel nostalgic about our own past, or some conjured past that belonged to -- and was then burnished by -- a previous generation that passed through these same spaces?
In this light, neon casts off the peculiar glow of those questions that have no answers.
CTA Notation: "Item is a photograph of a rooftop billboard atop a building on the west side of Victoria Street, north of Queen Street East. View is looking north-west from Queen Street East. Visible is a neon over-hanging sign advertising Underwood typewriters." Goad's 1913 atlas, however, shows that Underwood was located at 90 Richmond East.