Sunday, August 23, 2009

Tripping the lights fantastic: New York City neon











The trend these days in well-lit places like Times Square and the Las Vegas Strip seems to be toward big screen projection signs and less about old-fashioned neon, but give me the bent gaseous tubes any day. Luckily, there's still plenty of neon to be admired and gawked at in the Big Apple. We were in New York for a couple of days and I couldn't get enough of the bright lights just within a block or two of our mid-Manhattan hotel. They barely scratch the surface of all the great neon New York has to offer that you could spend weeks photographing. To me there are no bad neon signs. I love them all... the perfectly maintained ones, all bright and glowy; the older ones beginning to fade with age; and the sad ones with letters burned out pining for their glory days. Start spreading the news.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pretty soon everything will start becoming more projections than neon, it is a sign of advancement in technology...generally speaking it is cheaper and easier to maintain, and can more easily be changed and updated,

Also, the bright neon doesn't glare in someones window all night(as in the Chicken Place on Seinfeld that was on tonight)...

I think the neon signs are unique, and stand out more distinctly...I find neon signs to be better to look at...and of course, if a place has a neon sign with a letter burned out, it sometimes has hilarious results...(my favorite is the Waffle House with the burnt out W by my house...looks like awful house from the interstate)...there is something you won't see with projections...

Gunnar and Sherry said...

That's funny about the Waffle House! That would make a great website, if it doesn't already exist: funny burned out signs. I bet everything about the new projection signs is more practical: brighter, cheaper, more efficient. But looking at a neon sign is more like looking at an oil painting by an old master.