Working Girl Neon (19 Rector Street)

I know what what's on your mind, Tess McGill.  It's been a tough day.  Trouble at the office, and you just found out your boyfriend's been schtupping some cheap floozy on the side.  But I know what you're really thinking as you stand by the rail of the Staten Island ferry, gazing out at the Manhattan skyline.  Just like me, you're wondering: "what the hell is that red neon roof sign up there to the right of the Woolworth building?" 

OK, maybe that's not what Melanie Griffith's character had on her mind in this pivotal scene of Mike Nichol's 1988 film "Working Girl."  But it sure bugged me.  Such is my twisted, neon-obsessed view of the city.  A big roof sign in Lower Manhattan?  There aren't any there now, and I don't ever remember seeing one.  Oh well.  Tess McGill had bigger things to worry about, and so did I, really, so I filed this little mystery away into my mental accordion folder and turned my thoughts back toward the awesome eighties exploits of Melanie, Harrison, and Sigourney.

Working Girl mystery sign, at right. (Working Girl) 

Then, about two months ago, while browsing some old New York photos online, something caught my eye.  Something high up, on the upper reaches of one of the lesser-known downtown skyscrapers. 

19 Rector Street - the Working Girl mystery sign today. (T. Rinaldi)

The Working Girl mystery sign, I soon learned, belonged to a tower known only by its address: 19 Rector.  And, much to my surprise, the sign is still there, though it hasn't lit up in a good long time.  Its installation date is thus far unclear.  My search of the DOB web site was a bust.  The building went up in 1930, a jazz-age tower by architect Lafayette Goldstone, but the sign seems to be a later addition.  Zoning ordinances enacted in the 1960s pretty much banned roof signs like this (New York's skyline is less colorful now than it was then as a result).  But the city's restrictive sign laws probably wouldn't have applied in this instance, since the copy features only the building's address, not a commercial message.  Still, with its stainless steel channel letters and very midcentury letterforms, I'd suspect this guy was here well before the 1960s.

    

19 Rector, west facade, around the time of its completion in 1930.  The sign would be out of view, on the south elevation.  (Arthur Vitols, Byron Co. / Museum of the City of NY) 

 

The real mystery, though, is why the building let the sign go dark.  Actually, I suppose it's not so mysterious.  Just like the long dark roof sign over at Tudor City, the management probably just got tired of dealing with its upkeep.  A few of the letters probably went into a dim flicker; a steep repair quote sealed the deal, and the big red letters over 19 Rector joined New York's ghost fleet of darkened roof signs: Domino Sugar, Kentile Floors, Tudor City, the Hotel New Yorker.  In recent years, a few of these have come back to "light" (sorry!), albeit with LEDs rather than neon (see the Lackawanna Terminal sign in Hoboken and the Hotel New Yorker in Midtown).  Perhaps one day this old girl will get back to work, too.  To do so, however, may require some re-lettering: built to house offices, about 12 years ago the tower went condo, taking on a new address (88 Greenwich) in the process.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• In case you missed last week's post - the neon book is out the door!

• After my post two weeks ago, the Chelsea Hotel sign seems to have mysteriously come back to light.  Hmmmm....

• In LA, a candidate for the world's longest continually-functioning neon sign, at Clifton's Cafeteria on Main Street.

• It's not neon, but on a related note - by way of various sources, the one and only Prime Burger on East 51st Street is closing.  A Landmark-worthy fortess of Formica, with a pretty good old back-lit sign hidden under its awning.  A nauseating loss.

 

New York Neon: On The Books

After nearly a year of dropping semi-subtle plugs for what I've come to call the "neon book", I'm happy to finally be able to offer a peek at what this book of mine will actually look like.  Last week, after some final tweaks and revisions to the proofs, W.W. Norton sent her out to the printer.  The book's actual title is New York Neon.  The release is still a few months away (I'll keep some shameless self promotion up my sleeve for that event), but here's a preview.

The Cover.
 

To design the book's cover and interior, Norton hired the graphic design studio Modern Good, who did a gorgeous job with the layout and especially, I think, the cover (above).  The title font is Tarzana, a contemporary alphabet that suggests the letterforms you'll see on the old signs pictured inside the book.

Skeleton sign montage.
 

The book's content is the product of about six years of obsessive labor.  I began casually photographing old neon signs in New York back in 2006.  To my surprise, I realized no one had done a book on the subject – sure, there are books about old neon signs in LA, Vegas, Rt. 66, the USA as a whole, etc., and books that memorialize the great Times Square spectaculars – but none covering the real workhorse storefront signs of midcentury New York.

Pages from the Introduction. 
    

Although many share my enjoyment of these old signs, I found that few people – myself included – really understood the intricacies of how they came to be.  So the first part of the book is a heavily illustrated 50-page introduction outlining the history of illuminated signs, of neon sign shops in New York specifically, the story of their design and fabrication, and the way popular sentiment toward the signs has evolved through the years.  There is also an appendix at the back of the book with short "bios" on a handful of the more prominent neon shops that operated in New York during the early to middle decades of the 20th century.

 
After the introduction comes the real main course – 125 pages of contemporary photographs showing the signs as they exist today throughout the five boroughs of New York, in all their ancient splendor.   Each sign pictured is identified by location and business name.  Wherever possible, I have also provided the sign’s maker and date of installation, along with observations on the design or the business that commissioned it.

 

The production phase takes some time, but Norton will have the book in stores in plenty of time for the holiday shopping season.  The sticker price is $26.95 – probably less than ConEd charged to keep the P&G Bar sign lit for a long day's night.  What a deal!   It's even got an ISBN number (978-0-393-73341-9) and everything!   Readers of this blog will be the first to know when the book comes out – in the meantime, stay tuned for the usual clips from the cutting room floor.

Many sincere thanks to Nancy Green and Ben Yarling at W.W. Norton for all their help in getting the book ready to go, to Christine Dahlin who helped with the editing, to Modern Good for a great job with the design, and to everyone who helped along the way!

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• This is a special time of the year, if you're a fan of old signs and commercial archeology – Debra Jane Seltzer is on the road, posting photos of great discoveries made on the course of a multi-thousand-mile roadside Americana trek. This year, Debra Jane has headed from Brooklyn out to the Southwestern states.  She'll return by way of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati.  

• My cousin bought me a super cool neon-themed refrigerator magnet made by neon photographer Susan Mara Bregman – take a look!

• Brite Buy Liquors down in Tribeca appears to have shuttered, leaving its lovely vertical LIQUORS sign in peril.

Terminal Bar

A brief tribute this week to a sign I never saw:  the Terminal Bar, across Ninth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, was not the kind of place my parents brought me on our visits to New York when I was a kid.  And lo, by the time I was old enough to venture into such establishments on my own, it was but a memory.  One can get a sense for the good old days, though, in this really spectacular short film, part of a longer work by Stefan Nadelman, that I came across thanks to the great then-and-now study of the film "Taxi Driver" over at ScoutingNY (the Terminal Bar makes a brief cameo in Scorsese's 1976 film).  Mr. Nedelman's film uses photographs and reminiscences from his father Sheldon, who tended bar here for ten years.

The Terminal Bar and its neighbors, c. 1976, as depicted in "Taxi Driver". Having just about killed myself trying to get decent rainy night photos for the neon book, I have concluded that Scorsese must have opened some fire hydrants to pull this off.  ("Taxi Driver")

Together with its neighbors, the Exchange Bar and the Bus Stop Bar – both very congenial places, I'm sure – the Terminal Bar made a stirring sight in its day.  Imagine coming out of Port Authority to find THIS - New York's neon receiving line, there to greet you. 

Schnipper's Quality Kitchen, at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street - the site of the Terminal Bar today.  (T. Rinaldi)

The Terminal Bar and its neighbors are ancient history today, of course – Renzo Piano's gleaming New York Times building stands in their place.  Yet, almost improbably, some pretty good new neon has sprouted here on lower reaches of the new building.  Are these hearty seedlings of the signs that existed here before?  Or did someone just feel that this corner wouldn't look right without a good sign?  In a way, perhaps, a bit of both. 

(The New York Times building has some other great signs at street level – does anyone know who made them?)

Above: New signs on the lower reaches of the new New York Times building. (T. Rinaldi) 

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:
• The neon book has gone out to the printer!
• Did anyone watch Jeopardy last night (May 7, 2012)? The correct response to final Jeopardy was "What is NEON?" and yes, I am pleased to say I got it right.

Hotel Neon: The Chelsea Hotel

This is the first in a series of stories I intend to post under the title “Hotel Neon.”  These posts will explore the unique resonance of neon hotel signs in the American psyche. Each night as I came up out of the Seventh Avenue Subway, feeling worn and weary after long days at grad school, the Chelsea Hotel's big neon sign greeted me like a beacon of civilization, brightening the last leg of my trip home.  Then, one night last summer, the old sign went dark and didn't come on again.  It is still there, but has remained dim as the hotel undergoes its controversial renovation.  Last week, as scaffolding began to rise across the building's façade, I realized the time had come to take a good look at this especially significant sign, an icon among icons, and to petition the new management to treat it with due care as an important part of the historic building whose place it marks.  Looking west down 23rd Street at dusk.  (T. Rinaldi)  Like many prominent signs, surprisingly little is known of the Chelsea Hotel's three-story neon figurehead.  Old photographs suggest that it was at least the third illuminated sign to hang from the building's facade, having been preceded by two earlier "opal glass" incandescent signs.  The existing sign arrived in 1949.  My best efforts have thus far failed to identify its maker: records at the Buildings Department yielded an approximate installation date, but no fabricator.  My contact at Spectrum Signs, who oversaw the sign's maintenance for many years, couldn't tell me who made it, nor could Jerry Weinstein, the hotel's resident historian, or even Stanley Bard, who managed the hotel for decades. Before the neon sign went up in 1949, the Chelsea Hotel had these "opal" or "opalescent" glass signs, which were internally lit by incandescent bulbs.  The big vertical sign (above) was older, having been replaced by the more modest projecting sign (below) in 1931. (P.L. Sperr / NYPL; Berenice Abbott / NYPL) Since about 2006 the sign has been painted black, but before that, its original stainless steel channel letters and trim and maroon porcelain enamel panels remained exposed.  For whatever reason, maroon or burgundy porcelain was a favorite among New York signmakers of the '30s, '40s and '50s (the signs of the P&G Bar and the Brite Food Shop were prominent examples, and others can still be found at the Old Town Bar, Hinsch's Confectionary, Uptown Liquors, the M&M Pharmacy, and the defunct Wu Han Chinese Restaurant, to name just a few).  Three stainless steel bands over the "H" in HOTEL add a touch of streamlined class.  The lettering is matter-of-fact, HOTEL illuminated in understated white, CHELSEA in fluorescent pink, with a classic round-topped "A".   The old sign's maroon-colored porcelain and stainless steel accents remain beneath a coat of black paint.  Note the stainless steel trim over the "H" in HOTEL. (allvoices.com) When this installation first appeared here, big neon hotel signs like the Chelsea's could be found all over town.  As the years wore on, mainstream hotels did away with signs like these, leaving them to become associated with less reputable establishments that eventually devolved into flop joints, drug dens and whorehouses.  In the 1980s and 90s, the few neon hotel signs that remained in New York began to disappear as the old dives either spruced up or shut down.  By the time I began to survey New York's historic neon signs in 2006, only about a dozen authentic examples remained, and about half of these have disappeared since then. Rainy night in Chelsea: looking east down 23rd Street from the Chelsea Hotel. (Ross Savedge) The Chelsea Hotel never suffered the rough and tumble fate of many other hotels in New York.  Instead, as old hotel signs grew scarce, the Chelsea's stood out as a relic that embodied the spirit of the hotel's legendary inhabitants, whose ghosts seemed to be alive up there within those flickering neon tubes.  And, seasoned by the usual noirish connotations of seediness associated with other old neon hotel signs, the Chelsea's sign took on a multi-faceted appeal to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other sign in the city.  "It was there before I was," Stanley Bard told me of the old sign last year: "it was so iconic a sign, everyone knew it, so all I did was keep it there and not make any changes, just make sure it was safe and sound." The Chelsea's management featured the old sign on the hotel's business card until it closed last year. (Chelsea Hotel; T. Rinaldi). And so it was especially painful to see the sign go dark last year.  Likewise, it is especially important that it get the right treatment.  Yes, the building is landmarked, so the Landmarks Commission would, in theory, review any proposed work on the sign.  But signs have slipped through the LPC's review process before.  It would be a shame to see the scaffolding come down to reveal a squeeky clean new aluminum facsimile of the old sign, its 60 years of hard earned patina lost forever, something to point out cynically as a simulacrum of the overcleaning of the city around it.  Better would be for the old sign to emerge looking cleaned and repaired, but not replaced outright.  Maybe take it apart, clean the old porcelain and stainless finishes and put them back together again over a refurbished steel structure, afforded the same level of care one might give an old Cadillac of the same vintage, whose voluptuous tail fins might have swept beneath this old sign when it first came aglow on a New York night more than six decades ago.    Above: Outtakes from photoshoots at the Chelsea, 2008-2011.  (T. Rinaldi) IN OTHER NEON NEWS: • The latest installment on the Beatrice Inn sign restoration, from JVNY.

Allen and The White Horse

One of the most recognizable signs in New York is the work of a particularly obscure sign company.  The modest neon sign of the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street seems to be the lone surviving installation of the Allen Sign Company of Manhattan.  

The White Horse Tavern, at 567 Hudson Street, Manhattan. January 7, 2007. (T. Rinaldi)

Detail showing the mark of the Allen Sign Co., emblazoned on the sign's porcelain enamel faces.  (T. Rinaldi)

I know of no other surviving works by Allen, and have come across no other details on the firm - almost.  By some good fortune, I ran across a passing reference to the company in the December 1946 issue of Signs of the Times magazine, which names the firm's proprietors as Al (Allen?) and Sidney Rosenbloom, "both formerly with Claude Neon Lights in New York."  Claude, of course, was the veritable mothership of neon shops, having launched the commercial neon trade first in Paris before World War I and then in New York in 1924.  The blurb mentions another of Allen's works, a long-vanished vertical sign for the Manhattan Towers Hotel on the Upper West Side, which at 67 feet high was said to be the "tallest sign north of Times Square." 

Display ad from the 1950 Manhattan Classified Telephone Directory. (NYPL)

With the owner's names in hand, I then consulted the 1930 U.S. Census to see what I could turn up on the Rosenblooms.  Al Rosenbloom proves elusive: of several persons by that name, none can be clearly identified as the future proprietor of the Allen Sign Co.  Sidney, however, turns up living in Laurelton, Queens, age 34, his occupation listed as "Salesman – Sign" some fifteen years before the Signs of the Times blurb.  The Allen Sign Company appears in the Manhattan yellow pages from about 1945 through the mid-1970s, then vanishes.

  

Signs of the Times, December 1946.  (Signs of the Times, used with permission)

Today, the last surviving work of the Allen Sign Company may be this solitary sign that has hung over the door of the famed White Horse Tavern since 1946.  According to Jef Klein's History and Stories of the Best Bars of New York, the tavern itself began life in 1880 - it had already been around 64 years when its owners decided to go neon.  In the 1950s, the White Horse became known as a haunt for some of Greenwich Village's better known bohemians, lending the place the legendary status it enjoys to this day.

White Horse aglow, November 19, 2010. (T. Rinaldi)

The bohemians are mostly gone now, but the sign that beckoned them remains.  Its blackletter script and little white horse head reference the ye-old-pub signs of Great Britain.  For the color scheme, the Rosenblooms went for porcelain enamel sign faces with white lettering and border trim over a solid blue background, a standard palette more commonly used for wayfinding signs of the porcelain enamel era than for neon storefront displays.  The lettering glows in simple red neon, with fluorescent white for the horse (of course).

White Horse in the window, November 19, 2010. (T. Rinaldi)

As fine a work as it indubitably is, the White Horse sign likely owes its prominence to the notoriety of the tavern beneath it as much as to its own charm.  Even so, if the winds of attrition have carried off all but this one example of the Rosenbloom's handiwork, the Allen Sign Company can still lay claim to one of New York's finest old signs.  The Rosenbloom boys did good.

Outtakes from evening photoshoots at the White Horse on November 19 and December 21, 2010.  (T. Rinaldi)

Please drop me a line if you know anything more about the Allen Sign Company.

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• An exciting update on the Beatrice Inn sign restoration, at JVNY.

Maiman's Pharmacy

Last week came truly depressing news (by way of Project Neon and Brownstoner) on the disappearance of Maiman's Pharmacy and its splendid sign, which wrapped the corner of Franklin Avenue and  Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn for six decades.  This is the seventh classic neon sign to go dark or disappear so far this year in New York (as far as I know), all of them vanished with old independent businesses that have bitten the dust.

Maiman's Pharmacy, formerly at 821 Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn. (T. Rinaldi)

Maiman's had what I considered to be one of the best old signs in all of New York: first rate midcentury block and script letterforms, outlined in stainless steel channels and neon tubes in vibrant hues of pink, turquoise and white that set each other off beautifully. 

Maiman's Pharmacy, on a balmy summer night in June 2009. (T. Rinaldi)

The sign appeared around 1951, the work of the Silverescent Neon Sign Co. of Brooklyn.  Some time ago I interviewed Al Higger, the retired former president of Silverescent, who recalled that the Maiman's sign was an example of a somewhat standardized design scheme the company deployed for drug store jobs throughout the city in the 1950s.  The design was developed by Silverescent's longtime layout man Charlie Klein, whom Mr. Higger recalls as a talented draughtsman and, like most neon layout men in New York during those years, a member of the Sign Painter's Local 230. Klein's drug store signs usually involved script lettering for the owner's name, block letters for DRUGS or PHARMACY, and some variant of the traditional "Rx" prescription symbol for full effect.  

Silverescent manufacturer's plaque, formerly on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Franklin Ave. (T. Rinaldi)

When Mr. Higger told me this, another sign popped almost immediately into my head: that of the Antelis Pharmacy on Elm Avenue in Midwood.  Here survives another example of the Silverescent/Klein drug store sign.  Like Maiman's, the Antelis sign features the owner's name in script, set against block letters reading PHARMACY and a fine Rx symbol, illuminated in three shades of neon.  The script and the Rx symbol differed slightly between the two signs, but the block lettering was the same.  Interestingly, Mr. Klein seems to have employed the same sans-serif letterforms for another vanished Silverescent sign, at the old Faber's Arcade on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, which disappeared over the winter of 2010-2011.

Two iterations of the Silverescent/Klein drug store sign, at Maiman's (above) and the Antelis Pharmacy (below), at 1502 Elm Ave. in Brooklyn. (T. Rinaldi)

Block lettering at Antelis (above) and Maiman's (below). (T. Rinaldi)

Silverescent seems to have used the same letterforms at the former Faber's "Fascination" arcade in Coney Island. (T. Rinaldi)

I first photographed the Maiman's sign back in June 2009, during an epic all-day neon appreciation schlep that took me and a friend from Manhattan to Bed Stuy to Ozone Park to Far Rockaway then back to Crown Heights and finally Coney Island (we bade a grand farewell to the old R40 series subway cars that same day).  I came away with nice shots of Maiman's all aglow that night, but I wanted dusky shots for the neon book, so I eventually returned only to find the sign partially dimmed, apparently with a few transformer outages.  I tried again some months later but found the place closed for the night and the sign completely dark.  I had better luck this past December on my next (and last) trip, but then – after all that – I wound up using shots from that first visit back in 2009 for the book.

Maiman's in October 2010. (T. Rinaldi)

Somewhere along the way the owners gave the sign a good sprucing up, perhaps around the time the place changed hands a few years ago.  Someone cleaned and painted the porcelain enamel sign faces (painting porcelain enamel is like painting brick – sort of senseless but hey, points for TLC).  Whoever did this clearly had an appreciation for the sign:  the old Silverescent manufacturer's tag was carefully removed, cleaned and reinstalled, instead of just being painted over as usually happens.  This left me with the sense that Maiman's was in good hands and would be around for some time to come.  Alas, a grizzly photo at Brownstoner confirms the bad news that the sign and store have gone, leaving a dark and dreary sight in their wake.  Could it be that the sign found a good retirement home somewhere?  Fingers crossed.  Meanwhile, we still have at least one classic Silverescent/Klein drug store sign over at the Antelis Pharmacy – run out and admire while the admiring's good. Satisfy your pharmaceutical needs while you're at it.

Above: A series of photos from December 2011. (T. Rinaldi)

IN OTHER NEON NEWS:

• Every so often, some good news: at JVNY, progress on the Beatrice Inn sign restoration.

• At Ephemeral New York, some forgotten signs under awnings.

• Word from the Lost NY blog that Sokol Furniture in Red Hook, Brooklyn is closed and the sign likely gone or going soon.