Santa Barbara’s Neon Hey-Days

Santa Barbara Neon Week is dedicated to Nathan Marsak whose book, Los Angeles Neon inspired me to seek out the last glimmers of neon in Santa Barbara.

(This is the first of five planned posts on Santa Barbara neon this week.)

I love neon, especially the classy old signs, vibrant as Vaudeville. I love their hum and buzz, their abstract reflections on wet pavement, their unadulterated chutzpah. Hang a neon sign over a bar and it becomes classy. Hang it on a theater marquee and when you cross the street against the evening traffic, you feel like you’re going to the show. Really going. Neon sings with excitement. It puts the dress shoes on an evening. Neon hauls the moon half out of the sky and spills it on the pavement.

But while the rest of the world celebrates neon, Santa Barbara’s neon is quickly fading to a few lingering bright spots. Many of the old signs are threatened, most have disappeared already. Although there are a few more than what I’ve inventoried here, a later post for Neon Week is Santa Barbara Neon: The Driving Tour.  The tour ends appropriately at Roy, the restaurant on Carrillo Street, where you can ponder the old neon Jolly Tiger sign behind the bar over a great meal and a couple rounds of toasts to the old sights of Santa Barbara.

Tainted Lights

Neon is a tainted art form. For many, it remains associated with the unchecked march of outdoor ads, the cheap sleaze of places like Las Vegas, and cigarette smoke indoors. Known as “the scarlet whore of the advertising world,” the quintessential neon signs were the all-night liquor store, adult theaters, gasoline stations, and the huge hotel-front signs with the descending arrow endlessly beckoning through the night, Here! Here! Here!

For some, the taint is of classy dames, gleaming roadsters, and dark tendrils of jazz leaking from speakeasies. For these, there are the cowgirls waving their hat from the saddle over the High Desert Inn, the buzz of an all-night diner sign, the kicking leg of a burlesque dancer, or the tipped cocktail glass with an olive. Better still, a burlesque girl seated in a cocktail glass, kicking away at the night.

But for Santa Barbara, the kick is gone, or nearly so. There are few neon signs left. But Santa Barbara at one time had hundreds, if not thousands. They lined State Street, not just on the theaters and bars, but over many stores and on the front and top of many hotels. They speckled Cabrillo Boulevard and upper State and Hollister with their offers of Vacancies alongside the promises of Pools, Televisions, and Telephones. They were the sign of choice for nearly two decades.

Neon had detractors from the very beginning. By the 1960s when Las Vegas had adopted neon as the city’s favorite architectural garb, and most big city’s Main streets were neon alleys, the backlash was huge. Ladybird Johnson, President Lyndon’s first lady, invested herself in beautification projects during her stay at the White House from 1963 through 1969. She attacked billboards and gas stations and neon signs. In many cases, her sparks lit fires. In Santa Barbara, she was preaching to the choir. But more on that in the next post.

Neonology

But, what exactly is neon?

Neon itself, atomic symbol Ne and atomic number 10, is a common element in the universe, but is rare on Earth. The word neon comes from the Greek ‘neos’ meaning ‘new gas.’ Neon gas was first predicted by William Ramsey in 1897. The gas was then isolated by Ramsey and M. W. Travers in 1898 in London.  It is extracted from air – we breathe the stuff – in trace amounts (1 part in 65,000). It starts as a colorless, inert noble gas, but throws off a reddish-orange glow when exposed to an electrical field in a discharge tube or neon lamp.

The possibility of neon lighting dates all the way back to 1675 before electricity was wearing diapers, when French astronomer Jean Picard observed a faint glow in a mercury barometer tube when he shook it. It was treated as a plaything and curiosity at the time, awaiting the discovery of electricity and air-tight glass tubes

Nearly two hundred years later, in 1855, Heinrich Geissler invented the geissler tube. This tube was essentially a sealed enclosure with electrodes at either end. A geissler tube under low pressure with electrical voltage applied glowed. The result was electric discharge lamps or vapor lamps – transparent containers in which gas is energized by an applied voltage, and made to glow.

Geissler was a propitious combination of practical physicist and a journeyman glass-blower. Born in the Saxe-Meiningen region of Germany in 1814 he was from a family of glass-blowers. His skill set allowed him to become an accomplished designer and fabricator of scientific apparatus. For example, he invented a mercury vacuum pump called a vaporimeter that measured the alcoholic strength of wine. But his Geissler tubes are his most lasting legacy. He experimented with sizing and shaping the tubes into humorous and whimsical shapes, and achieved new colors through mixtures of rare gases.

Then in 1896, Daniel MacFarlan Moore, a General Electric Company employee, invented the Moore tube. Unlike Geissler who was almost playful in his designs, Moore was shooting for an industrial light source. The Moore light was a 1 ¾” continuous glass tube, up to 200 feet long, filled with carbon dioxide. When ionized by a high voltage current, a pleasing white light flowed that effectively illuminated a large area. The tubes were not adequately sealed and the electrodes were fairly quickly eroded by exposure to the carbon dioxide, but the concept paved the way for both fluorescent and neon lights.

Lighting Up

French engineer, chemist and inventor, Georges Claude is the patron saint of neon light. Around 1907, both William Ramsay, the discoverer of neon, and Daniel Moore, approached and encouraged Claude to experiment with neon.

Claude was working on isolating oxygen for medical and welding applications at the time. Both Claude and Karl von Linde of Germany developed methods to generate liquid air in commercial qualities in 1907. But because of his dialogues with Moore, Claude experimented with a Moore tube filled with neon and sparked a brilliant orange-red light that altered the course of human art and culture.

Claude saw both the potential and understood the pitfalls. In short order, he tackled the obstacles to making neon lighting commercially viable. In addition to the process of extracting neon from liquefied air, Claude found ways to seal the Moore tubes, and created nonreactive electrodes large enough to handle the ion bombardment inside the glass tubes without corroding.

On December 11, 1910, Claude demonstrated two 38-foot long neon tubes at the Paris Expo being held at the Grand Palais.

By 1911, Claude had formed the Claude Neon Company. In the beginning, the company attempted to convince building owners to install neon lighting as interior lighting fixtures, but neon was no more energy-efficient than conventional incandescent lighting. Claude, ever practical, shifted the company’s focus to signs and advertisements.

In 1912, Claude’s first salesman, Jacques Fonseque, made the first sale of a neon sign to a Paris barber shop. Shortly afterwards, Cinzano purchased a sign spelling out CINZANO in white letters three-and-a-half-feet-tall which they installed on a prominent Paris rooftop. Georges Claude patented the neon lighting tube on Jan. 19th, 1915, U.S. Patent 1,125,476. The U.S. patent was granted in 1915, stating that it had been invented in 1910.

Santa Barbara Gets Lit

The first neon sign in Santa Barbara, according to neon sign collector Don Bushnell, was for the Studebaker dealership at 15 East Sola Street in 1923. It was the second neon sign in the United States and it caused drivers to come to a full stop in front of it just to gawk.

The first sign in the United States was for Earle Anthony’s Packard dealership in Los Angeles. Anthony had had to go to Paris to obtain his Packard signs. He traveled to Paris in 1922 and met Jacques Fonseque. One can imagine that he did

not meet Fonseque randomly, as one might at a bar, but intentionally, after seeing the white neon letters spelling out Cinzano on a rooftop, or one of the many other signs that were cropping up in the city. Anthony paid $1250 apiece for those first signs, roughly $30,000 in today’s dollars for the two signs.

In Santa Barbara, neon filtered in from the outside for the first few years and the spread was slow. Then in 1930, Messenger Sheet Metal located at 235 Haley, getting requests from customers, converted themselves from a sheet metal and heating plant to Messenger & Montgomery, manufacturers of neon and electrical signs and metal kayaks.

Run by Lester Montgomery, the company’s biggest push was for a metal kayak, called a K—ak, that the firm had designed. The $34.50 boat was advertised as non-sinkable and graced the back cover of the telephone book for three years running.

Records of which businesses Messenger & Montgomery built signs for have not been preserved. But the demand was apparently low. The firm was gone within three years, Lester and all.

The Neon Boom

Just a few years later, everything changed. In 1935, Neon Electro-Craft opened their doors at 427 State Street. Neon Electro-Craft stayed in business for three years, became Western Neon Company for a year, and then closed. In the meantime, a year after Neon Electro-Craft opened, Electrical Products at 707 State and Modern Neon Signs at 19 W. Ortega opened. Electrical Products was converted to defense manufacturing during WWII, but Modern Neon remained open and operable.

Immediately after the war firms that flashed on the scene were The Neon Company of Santa Barbara located at 120 ½ W. Canon Perdido and Darville Neon Sign Company a couple blocks down at 221 W. Canon Perdido. Electrical Products returned to the neon sign business in 1956, this time located in a Quonset hut at 6201 Hollister where the Elephant Bar stands today. Electrical was purchased by Federal Signs in the late 60s and lasted until the early 1970s when they closed their doors.

During the late 70s and 80s, as if in reaction to the laws in town that made it harder and harder to erect a neon sign, several firms gave it a go. Ernie Thompson, a veteran glass bender from Modern Neon Signs, retired in 1974 and opened his own shop at his house. He continued in business through 1986. Neon for Eons opened in 1985 on Pine in Goleta but lasted less than a decade. Davies Neon (1988 – 1992) called himself “America’ Neon Drifter” and claimed to be the “only local neon craftsman.”

Modern Neon remained the most stable and respected firm all the way up until they shuttered their remaining sales office in town in 2002. Bartender of 40 years, Jimmy O’Toole at Joe’s Café, recalls Joe McCarthy of Modern Signs coming by to repair their sign well into the early 80s. Ernie Thompson was for many years a familiar name, crafting signs for Modern like the Blue Skies Trailer Park sign in the early 1960s. Another of the great Modern neon artists was George Wheaton who, according to Ron Wilkinson, owner of Vogue Signs from 1990 to 2002, “truly influenced the look of Santa Barbara.”

For several years in the mid- to late-thirties, there were three dedicated firms focused on creating neon signs in Santa Barbara. Ironically, part of what drove the increased demand for neon signs was the harsh economy. In a period of little cash flow, movies were inexpensive and offered an escape. The movie industry boomed, and with it, movie theaters.

Making Movies

Santa Barbara maintained its share of theaters long before movies hit the scene, but the movies brought with them the “Hollywood virus” of searchlights and neon signs. It wasn’t considered a virus at the time, especially because the virus started in Santa Barbara.

In 1911, the Essanay Film Company of Chicago used Santa Barbara as the setting for a western. But in 1912, the American Film Manufacturing Company, better known as the Flying A, set up shop. The studio had released 125 titles the previous year, and they were soon releasing upwards of three films a week.

Flying A would come and go before the first neon sign, but Santa Barbara and movies were drawn together in a close weave. Later that same year, 1912, the Palace Theater opened at 904 State, the current site of Border’s Books. The Palace was the first theater in Santa Barbara built specifically for movies, showing many of Flying A’s first run productions. In 1924, Louis Kaplan bought the theater and renamed it as the Rose Theater.

In the meantime, the California Theater opened on December 9, 1919 showing Soldiers of Fortune starring Richard Harding Davis. Owned by Edward Johnson’s Portola Theater Company, which was to open the Granada a few years later, the theater installed an organ made by Robert Morgan to supply the soundtracks for the silent films they showed. The California stood at 20 West Canon Perdido and in the days before neon erected a large and distinctive incandescent sign on their rooftop that could be seen for miles. This was to be one of the first large rooftop displays in Santa Barbara. The California would close in 1962.

Later theaters went in with neon right from the start. Movies and neon seemed wed from the moment neon came ashore in 1923. The Granada may have been the first theater in Santa Barbara to use neon in their marquee. Opened April 9, 1924, the show combined speakers with a ballet performance and the world premiere of Mademoiselle Midnight, a melodrama starring Mae Murray and Robert Edson.

By 1931, when the Fox Arlington was under construction, Warner Brothers and Fox were the theater owners and competitors in town. Warner had four theaters (through the acquisition of Portola Theater Company’s properties) to Fox’s two.

[Looking for photo of Fox Arlington with FOX still on the needle. Night and day shots.]

The Arlington took neon a step further. The Great Depression was over the stoop and inside many people’s houses by now, and movies were the source of escape, humor, and hope. Riding on the crest of film’s popularity, Fox theaters was building a string of grand theaters across the southland. The interiors evoked Mexican villages in sleepier climes. The exteriors rose above their respective cities with great needles injecting spinning neon signs that read FOX into the sky.

Although the tales about Santa Barbara’s Fox Arlington have architect James Plunkett sketching in an inspired frenzy for the Fox corporate office, local neon collector Don Bushnell has another story. Bushnell’s father David Bushnell was a theater architect during the same period and worked with standard theater design templates to design very similar theaters in places like Monrovia and Whittier. Bushnell remembers visiting the sites during their construction, the interiors and exteriors “exact replicas of the Arlington, except they were built before 1931.”

The Fox Arlington Theatre opened on May 22, 1931 with the Daddy Long Legs starring Janet Gaynor and Warner Baxter.

Parade of Lights

Following the march of movie theaters, hotels and other businesses began hanging neon signs by the score. Lower State Street was the first beneficiary of the new signs. Photos starting in the late thirties show a high concentration of neon as every other shop put up the latest and greatest signs.

Then the signs slipped down along the beach and up State Street as neon became the means of advertising motels. The neon on motels started in the 1930s, but the number and creativity of the signs bloomed in the post-WWII years when Americans took to their cars to see the country and travel became a part of the national code of ethics.

In Montecito, the Miramar erected neon signs on their main building, and several other motels and businesses on the Coast Highway followed suit. The Biltmore, off the beaten track, put up neon signs in the highway medians to point the way to the hotel on the beach.

Cabrillo sported the greatest number of neon motels, starting with Trevillian Company’s Mar Monte where the Radisson Hotel stands today. The string of neon motel signs shone all the way down to Castillo where it turned the corner and climbed to Montecito Street.

Naturally, restaurants that supported the motels lit up their façades. The Pink Cricket in Montecito, the Lobster House on Cabrillo, and the Blue Onion, Loop’s or Lloyd’s, and Kerry’s on State Street.

Signs generally appear on photos of other things, so it is impossible to fully inventory signs in Santa Barbara. The postcards shown here, so generously provided by John Fritsche and Nathan Marsak, give us some idea of the universality and creativity of this form of signage. There was something stylish and graceful in neon that was lost when we went – for reasons of cost, but more for reasons of enforced taste – to plastic and wood. This dual image of the Western Village Motel before and after the change shows, at least in my opinion, that we did not so much improve our signage with the outlawing of neon, as we made it look cheaper.

So what happened in Santa Barbara? Where are all the neon signs of the forties and fifties? Read the next posts!

Additional posts on neon:

• The Dying of the Light: Santa Barbara Outlaws Neon
• A Pictorial Journey through Santa Barbara’s Neon Hey Days:
  • Cabrillo Boulevard
  • The Beach Zone
  • Downtown
  • Uptown
  • Montecito
• Neon Rides Out of Town
• Neon Liberation: Santa Barbara’s Neon Collector
• Santa Barbara Neon Driving Tour (coming!)

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