No Vacancy in Vintage Vegas

I recently took a journey through the Neon Museum of Las Vegas: a graveyard of Vegas signage. I spent most of my formative years in Las Vegas, 1981-1988, and gaudy neon was everywhere.

Ironically, my earliest neon memories don’t begin in Vegas but with my family’s road trips across the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We stayed in Holiday Inn hotels along the way. As part of the ritual of car travel, I was given the job of spotting the gigantic neon Holiday Inn sign that would pop out from behind the trees off the highway. I was nicknamed “Eagle Eye” for my ability to point out the signs from far distances. This is where my fixation with big bright hotel signs began and inadvertently my keen “eagle eye” was honed.

Shortly thereafter, we moved from the suburbs of Detroit to Las Vegas, the city of hotels.

As an adult, I fly back to Las Vegas frequently and I relive my youth by driving around the city in a rent-a-car with my camera in tow capturing the city I once knew. In this piece for Hyperallergic, I am posting photographs from my ongoing photo documentary series consisting of Las Vegas hotel & motel photographs from 2007 to the present.

Most of the signs have survived but they will eventually meet their maker — like they all do — and end up in the Neon Sign Museum or the institution’s large Neon Boneyard.

The majority of these Vegas hotel signs were created by a sign company called YESCO (Young Electric Sign Company), which is a Mormon-owned establishment that dominated the Vegas sign industry for years. I remember as a kid seeing the YESCO logo on all these signs, and I had fantasies of calling them up to ask if I could get a small version of the original 1970s neon Holiday Inn hotel sign recreated for placement in my backyard.

One of the designers contracted by YESCO was Betty Willis, who was one of the first female sign designers employed by the company in the 1950s. She designed a number of renowned city landmarks, including the ubiquitous “Welcome To Las Vegas” sign and the signs for a number of hotels and motels like the Moulin Rouge & the Blue Angel Motel. The Blue Angel continues to be a Vegas landmark, though is not very angelic but actually a very dodgy establishment located in a rough part of downtown.

Enjoy this journey into vintage Vegas future past present.

All images copyright the photographer