Feature: Neon Museum
Anything is possible Las Vegas’ Neon Museum approaches its 10th anniversary. By David McKee
H
istoric preservation has never been high on Sin City’s list of priorities but the Neon Museum, just north
of Downtown, is helping to change that. Founded in 2012, it catalyzed a scrapyard of defunct signage into a beautiful, curated collection, fronted by a visitors center that was created from the lobby building of the curvilinear La Concha Motel, a handsome, 1961 vestige of Googie architecture that used to adorn the Las Vegas Strip but moved to 770 N. Las Vegas Boulevard in 2006. Out back is a massive array of neon signage (and some not-soneon, like the Treasure Island marquee that is best viewed by satellite) mainly from casinos, but also from restaurants and other bygone Vegas landmarks. Last year, the Neon Museum achieved accreditation from the American Association of Museums, the highest such honor in the U.S. Other accolades include being shortlisted as one of Las Vegas’ top-10 attractions by such media outlets as MSN, Vegas. com, forbes.com and USA Today. Most of the 2.27acre footprint of the Museum is taken up by the Neon Volume 18: Issue 150
Boneyard, a term whose origins are explained below. Donors to the Boneyard have notably included Young Electric Sign Co. (popularly known as YESCO). The
collection, which includes signage dating back to the 1930s, began being incorporated as a nonprofit in 1996 and has been growing exponentially ever since. The newest augmentation is “Brilliant! Jackpot,” an immersive audio-visual installation that revives through the magic of photography, drone footage, 3-D photogrammetry, Adobe Illustrator and 80,000 lumens of light antique signage that had seemed irretrievably defunct. And that’s just a small sampling of what the Neon Museum has to offer. To learn more, we turned to Executive Director Aaron Berger, who was lured to Las Vegas from Atlanta, trading humidity for dry heat … and all the preservation challenges that come with it. We spoke with him from his Vegas office. What was the genesis of the Neon Museum? The museum itself is really attributed to a small group of individuals that, in the Nineties, were smart enough to say ‘We need to find ways to preserve Las Vegas’ 43
