Bright ideas

When Will Durham was a child, he had insomnia—and he liked to collect things, a combination that foreshadowed what would eventually become his life’s mission.

“I hated to be the last one awake,” he said. He’d been downtown at night a few times, so he knew that people there were awake late, too. “I’d look to downtown Reno, and I could see the glow of the neon. It comforted me to know I wasn’t the last one awake.”

“That’s how the seed got planted,” said Durham, who now heads up the Nevada Neon Project—a nonprofit with nine board members, no website, about 260 Facebook fans, almost 5,000 Instagram followers and over 100 neon signs. The signs have come from casinos, motels and other businesses in Reno, Las Vegas and other Nevada locales. Some are from such well-known, long-ago casinos as the Mapes Hotel, Harold’s Club and the Nevada Club. They’re housed, for now anyway, in storage units and semi-trailers.

As some of Reno’s motels are sold and demolished to make way for new constructions, Durham is trying to acquire as many of their signs as possible for restoration and eventual display.

Fallen icons

On a breezy spring evening, shortly before sunset, Durham stood on the sidewalk at 330 N. Arlington Ave., across from the Sands Casino. The El Ray Motel had stood at that address, and now the only things on the property were a chain link fence, a pile of concrete blocks and splintered boards, a yellow excavator that would soon remove the debris, and the motel’s neon sign. No one seems to know its exact origin date, but it has the telltale swooshes and cheerful script font that signified a national lust for both travel and super-bold graphics in the 1950s and early ’60s. Now, the sites of the El Ray and its next-door-neighbor, the Star of Reno, are vacant lots, and the City Center and Keno Motels on West Street, which were back-fence neighbors, are awaiting demolition.

If things had gone Durham’s way, he would have negotiated with the motels’ purchaser, Colorado-based Jacobs Entertainment, Inc., to salvage the signs for future use.

“As soon as I heard that the Jacobs group was buying these properties, I called them the next day,” he said. He hoped that his group’s track record of preservation would convince Jacobs to part with the signs, but the company opted to keep them to use in its proposed Fountain District development.

Founder Jeff Jacobs declined RN&R’s request for a phone interview. His company sent a prepared statement that read, in part, “Jacobs Entertainment Inc. is committed to protecting and preserving more than half a dozen neon signs from Reno’s historic West Fourth Street corridor.”

The statement acknowledged that the signs are important pieces of Reno history and continued, “The preservation of every neon sign, regardless of its condition or size, is an integral element of the Fountain District project.” No details were given regarding how the signs would be displayed.

“That worries me a little bit,” said Durham. “Just because we’ve been working so hard to kind of tell a bigger story with all these signs.”

Along with signs, he’s also been collecting casino ephemera—matchbooks, playing cards, menus, poker chips, swizzle sticks and the like. “I actually have some carpet from the Sands,” he said. And his group hopes to one day open a museum.

Building the collection

The next chapter in Durham’s growing attachment to neon, after looking at the lights from his room as a child, took place in the ’90s when he was sharing a house with some friends. His part of the house was a giant sunroom. When he moved his things in, they didn’t fill up the sunroom. He wondered what to do with the empty space.

“I set up a lounge,” he said. “And I was like, ’I need something substantial in there.’” He bought some neon signs—including a “pool” sign with a bikini-clad diver outlined in red—to use as decor from the Zephyr Motel on West Fourth Street, which was closing.

As of 1999, Durham could count the number of signs he’d acquired on one hand. That year, Harold’s Club, which had opened in 1935 and closed in 1995, was slated for demolition. The old owners had been family friends, Durham said, but by the time the casino closed, it was owned by Harrah’s, so when Durham decided he wanted to try to salvage its signs, he had no connections to rely on.

“I had to make a deal with the demolition people,” he said.

Harold’s Club had a 70-foot wide mural made of porcelain panels. It depicts a group of white settlers in a wagon train going about their daily labors in an idyllic meadow on the left, Native Americans in loincloths lying in wait, apparently ready to attack, on the right, and a light-up waterfall separating the two groups.

Above the image, neon letters in all-caps Helvetica read, “Dedicated in all humility to those who blazed the trail.”

The mural was removed and stored, but, as demolition day approached, the letters remained. Durham thought the two should be kept together.

The demolition crew agreed to allow him to enter the property, but only for a day or two. He made several trips up to the roof, he said, each time carrying down two or so letters, which he recalled being about 20-24 inches high.

“I was able to get them just before it was demolished,” he said.

(It’s perhaps worth a diversion here, for readers who are wondering, to mention that, yes, the tone and content of the mural were debated. The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony declined to take a position on whether it should remain on display—though tribal chairman Arlan Melendez did point out that members of Nevada tribes did not wear loincloths or attack settlers. In 2003, the mural was reinstalled at the Reno-Sparks Livestock Events Center, where it remains today, neon letters and all. Retired journalist Bruce Bledsoe, writing for the Online Nevada Encyclopedia, noted that it was “a considerable distance from the central city where, one assumes, it could be seen but not seen too much.”)

Shortly afterward, Durham acquired several signs from the Mapes Hotel, including the one with the famous twin cowboys whose blue-jeaned legs make up the “M” in Mapes and the one touting the “World Famous Skyroom” in an all-caps Deco font.

Acquiring the signs from those famous properties put some wind in the Nevada Neon Project’s sails. As Durham tells it, his collection now seemed legitimate to the public. It’s been increasing ever since.

Many signs have been donated. “The biggest companies in Nevada, like MGM in Las Vegas, they donate signs,” Durham said. “I just got a sign from Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Las Vegas.”

And many signs have been purchased—either after a business had closed, or, in some cases, long before. “I bought the Merry Wink Motel sign like 15 years ago, maybe longer,” Durham said. The large sign has a scuffed, brick-red background and a man with a wide grin, a top hat and a thick, white beard that makes it look like his name might be Pappy. He’s outlined in neon, and he winks at night. “He’s been shot in the head,” Durham said. “He’s got a bullet hole in him.” But he emanates the charm of bygone eras strongly enough that when a collector came through town buying signs to take to Wisconsin, Durham made the motel owner an offer. “We want to keep it part of our landscape,” he said, adding that the property, which is near The Summit mall, will eventually be redeveloped, and when that happens he plans to take possession of the sign. But, for now, the Merry Wink is still in operation.

The bulk of the Nevada Neon Project’s signs are from the 1930s through ’60s, but not all of them. “We collect some modern signs, too” Durham said. “I think a mistake is made to only preserve things that aren’t new. If you look at those streetscapes from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, you wish that someone would have thought ahead and saved some of those things. So, we’ve preserved some modern signs like the Aces ballfield. The Aces have been very good about letting us preserve the signs that are coming down, and some of those are modern, but they’re done in the old vintage style.”

He also has possession of one sign from a former business that Gen Xers still swoon over, Deux Gros Nez. The second-floor café on California Avenue was the setting of many a coming-of-age story, many a friendship forged and many a novel draft until it closed in 2006. And when a selection of the Nevada Neon Project’s pieces were spruced up and put on display in the Nevada Museum of Art in 2012, Durham said that seeing the café’s sign in lights reminded at least one museum visitor of a long-ago break-up that took place there. He heard stories from other museum visitors about neon reminding people of other things too, like places where they’d gotten engaged. It wasn’t all heartbreak.

Stories like these are among the reasons he’s passionate about preserving signs. They’re tangible souvenirs of the community’s past. They tell Nevada’s stories, both personal and cultural.

“The signs act as this catalyst for these amazing, rich conversations we could have about our cultural heritage,” he said. “There’s a lot of story to tell.” Levi’s were invented here, and “Burning Man—the man was always draped in neon,” he said, listing examples. “We could have 20 years of exhibitions just scratching the surface.”

“We can’t keep all the buildings—progress happens,” said Durham, referring to the doomed downtown motels. But he’s trying his best to be a good steward for any pieces of history he can get a hold of.

Changing times, changing tastes

While Reno’s collective appreciation for vintage neon seems to be going strong, the demand for new neon has declined in recent years. Jeff Johnson is a neon artist who makes both fine art and commercial signs and also does repairs. “People would rather pay me to fix their Bud Light signs than for anything artistic,” he said.

While some modern businesses that align with vintage mindsets—like Golden Jackal or Neon Envy—do use neon signs, a lot of new shops and eateries have LEDs or backlit signs.

“I was told that millennials don’t like neon,” said Johnson. “I think the next generation doesn’t care. None of their bars have them. None of the breweries.”

Kenneth Hines, who owns Color of Neon sign shop, also reported a decreased demand for new signs. “The new market is really tough,” he said. “I don’t do too much commercial neon any more. It’s mainly pieces that people want in their house”—designs that say things like “Joe’s Place” or “Sam’s Bar” for their living areas. He’s also noticed a sudden demand for neon hashtags to hang inside of businesses. He’s done maybe six of those.

But repairing older tubes from casinos, motels and restaurants that are subject to age and weather keeps Hines employed for 40 hours a week, sometimes more.

A large casino might need its neon repaired weekly, he said. Casinos contract with sign companies such as Yesco or Custom Sign and Crane, and those companies deliver the pieces to Hines’ workshop, where he’ll replace glass, electrodes and gas.

Hines, who figures it’ll be at least a decade before he retires, is concerned about the future of the craft.

“I tell people, from the time I started to the time I could do anything that walked through my door and not have any reservations about it, it took me like seven years.” He’s been doing it for 40 years now, he said, and he doesn’t know of anyone who wants to apprentice to replace him.

“I have tried to train a few people, but they just don’t hang in there,” he said. “It takes a real passion for doing the neon.”

Future aspirations

Las Vegas has its Neon Musuem, which consists of a visitors center shaped in a double hyperbolic parabaloid—read swoopy and space-age like on the The Jetsons—and the Neon Boneyard, a two-acre lot where defunct signs are artfully piled and tower over visitors.

The museum that Durham envisions for Reno is quite different from that of its Southern Nevada counterpoint.

“I think we can do our museum in a way that’s not copying,” he said. “Our exhibition philosophy is much different. And so I think we can do it in a way that feels fresh. We want it to be a modern take on something that’s from our past.”

“These signs are from fun places, party places,” he elaborated. “They’re leisure, and so we would want to capture some of that energy. I can picture going into a room of our museum, where you’re hearing some of the music of the time. You’re hearing Johnny Cash, you’re hearing doo-wop. It adds a layer, to also take advantage of all the graphics from these places. You think of all the old billboards and the matchbooks and the playing cards and the carpets—there’s so many rich layers of visual.”

“There’s just so much of our history that’s worth telling,” he said. “This is using the signs as an entrée to talk about anything.”

The Nevada Neon Project’s aspirational museum doesn’t yet have a location, a budget or a business plan. But it does have a development expert—board member Megan Merenda, who worked on fundraising with the Nevada Discovery Museum during its planning and inception and is now director of philanthropy for The Nature Conservancy.

And for Durham who’s been collecting neon for 23 years so far, the long road ahead doesn’t seem to faze him.

“I don’t want people to be thinking that the neon story in Reno is over, because it’s not,” he said. He’s even planning to ask the state legislature to make neon Nevada’s official state element.