Glow West: How Los Angeles' Neon Language Set the Tone for Las Vegas' Iconic Cityscape
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Long before Angelenos were constrained by bumper-to-bumper traffic, the city's streets presented a wide, expansive sprawl ripe for new businesses and roadside attractions designed to reel motorists in with bright lights and marketing extravaganzas. Neon lights answered that call. They were brilliant, fanciful, and strictly twentieth century. Their vivid velocity, easy cheerfulness, and attention-grabbing shimmer helped define what Los Angeles was and what it had to offer. The city's emphasis on neon decoration extended even to its downtown buildings, constructed under the 1911 height restriction that limited structures to 150 feet. To stand out among block after block of twelve-story buildings, double-sided vertical signs stretched toward the sky. Neon companies sprouted across Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s and went to great lengths to promote themselves and the new advertising medium they represented.(1)
The automobile cemented neon's growth across Los Angeles, extending the commercial strip block after block.
In 1940, Wilshire Boulevard hummed with the vibrant hum of bent glass tubes charged with inert gas, glowing in shades of fiery orange-red, cobalt, and silvery white. Angelenos basked in the light of signs advertising dentists, drive-ins, and dance halls. These were not merely decorations. They were a visual language, steadily drawing residents into the growing commercial corridors of Southern California.
Ask most Americans where neon was born as a cultural force and the answer comes easily: Las Vegas. The Strip, the Fremont Street casinos, the blinking cowboy, the martini glass — these images have permeated the popular imagination so thoroughly that the city's origin story seems self-evident. But origin stories have a way of being reinvented over time. Long before a single bulb was screwed into the El Rancho Vegas, the craftsmen, designers, and glass benders who would build the Strip were already at work in Los Angeles.(2)
Las Vegas can't take full credit for neon spectacle. Southern California's sign shops, design studios, and visual landscape were key influences on the look and feel of how Vegas signs took shape. The desert concentrated what Los Angeles had already showcased, while Southern California's own foundational role quietly dimmed. What distinguished Las Vegas from the rest of America was the dense saturation of neon within a single corridor: powered by electricity from the newly completed Hoover Dam, the signs lifted Downtown Las Vegas out of the shadows into blinding, blinking light, rebranding the city as Glitter Gulch by the 1940s.
Around 1926, Earle C. Anthony, a Packard automobile dealer, purchased two neon signs from French engineer Georges Claude's neon factory and installed them at his Los Angeles showroom. They caused quite a stir: the Los Angeles Police Department contended the signs were generating traffic jams as locals traveled across town simply to catch a glimpse of them.(3) By 1925, Los Angeles' first dedicated electric-sign shop, Electrical Products Corporation, had already acquired the Claude franchise for all the western states, expanding its business by manufacturing licensed Claude neon signs under his patents.(4)
Southern California was the ideal breeding ground. By the early 1920s, car culture dominated the city's commercial economy, and roadside visibility was critical for small business success. Expansive, wide boulevards gave drivers unobstructed views showcasing luminous signage in ways the dense Eastern cities couldn't.(5) By the mid 1930s, demand had generated a flurry of glassblowing shops, electrical supply houses, and sign fabrication studios that trained entire generations of craftsmen.
The history of neon is a history of skilled labor, and the labor that built Las Vegas most certainly came from Southern California. Unfortunately, the names and colorful histories of the vast majority of these sign designers have been lost to the hustle of commercialization. The Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO), though founded in Salt Lake City, drew heavily on California talent and went on to design some of the Strip's most recognizable signs, including the original Stardust marquee and the Sands.(6) Herman Boernge, who joined YESCO in 1948 after hailing from Los Angeles, gained national recognition for neon work that included the Golden Nugget, the Flamingo, and the Sands, among many others.(6)
When casino developers began building along Highway 91 in the 1940s, they did not look to New York for their signage. They called fabricators and designers they already knew from the commercial strips of Los Angeles. The transfer of craft and visual vocabulary was direct and contractual. That sensibility found its fullest early expression in the Flamingo, the first luxury resort of its kind on the Strip, developed by Bugsy Siegel and designed by California architect George Vernon Russell. The project was backed by Hollywood Reporter owner Billy Wilkerson, who had already built a track record of glamorous Los Angeles venues — Cafe Trocadero, Ciro's, and Vendome among them. The Flamingo was, in every meaningful sense, a Hollywood export dressed in desert light.(7)
Perhaps it was the whirl of spinning roulette wheels or the chime of the slots, but the glittering spread of neon signs became so thoroughly embedded in the American imagination of Las Vegas that Los Angeles' prior claim to the title of Neon City was quietly revoked and reassigned to Sin City. The design grammar of the Las Vegas Strip did not emerge from the desert. Animated chasing lights, sweeping script lettering, and starburst atomic motifs all originated in a broader Southern California aesthetic now known as Googie architecture, a style engineered to arrest attention at thirty-five miles per hour. Googie flourished on the commercial strips of Los Angeles before migrating east along U.S. Route 91.(8) The casino designers of the early Strip were not pioneering a new idiom. They were applying a proven one, sourced from the city they had just left.
If Los Angeles was all aglow with neon, why is Las Vegas deemed the innovator? Concentration. What existed in Los Angeles was distributed across hundreds of miles of sprawl. Las Vegas compressed that bright demarcation into a stretch less than five miles long, visually cementing its impact in ways that Los Angeles's boundless westward sprawl never allowed.
Hollywood fixed the Strip in the American imagination as a neon kingdom unto itself, a city that had conjured its own blazing identity from the desert floor. Meanwhile, Los Angeles, was quietly dismantling its own evidence. Beginning in the late 1950s, municipal sign ordinances obliterated thousands of neon signs from the city's commercial corridors, replacing them with flat, corporate plastic. Los Angeles has a habit of erasing what it builds. The neon era was no exception.
The Museum of Neon Art (MONA), founded in Los Angeles in 1981 and now headquartered in Glendale, has spent four decades arguing that the neon tradition belongs to this city as surely as the film tradition does. Its collection of rescued signs reads as an inventory of a lost metropolis. Surviving corridors remain on Van Nuys Boulevard and in East Los Angeles, though they require historical literacy to read as the artifacts they are.
The craftsman heating a glass tube on Wilshire Boulevard in 1940 was practicing a Los Angeles-centric trade. The trades followed the work, and the apprentice would follow, eventually taking a contract in Nevada, where a developer wanted to drown out the night. Despite Los Angeles’ early splash of blazing neon, the lights would dim, and an entire visual culture would vanish, thwarted by sprawl and regulation.
Las Vegas is Los Angeles's brightest invention. It simply forgot to put a return address on the package. The neon revival of recent decades has begun to restore some historical memory, but the fuller story waits in the surviving signs and oral histories of the craftsmen whose hands shaped both cities. Los Angeles certainly cast its warm glow across a burgeoning center of amusement and entertainment — and if fame, fortune, and neon dominance have proven as fickle as the luck of the house, the city that made them has yet to collect its winnings.
Endnotes
- Tom Zimmerman with J. Eric Lynxwiler, Spectacular Illumination: Neon Los Angeles 1925–1965 (Angel City Press, 2004), 15.
- The El Rancho Vegas opened on Highway 91 on April 3, 1941, and is generally credited as the first resort on what became the Strip. See David Schwartz, Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling (Gotham Books, 2006), 390–394.
- Carolyn L. Kane, Electrographic Architecture (University of Chicago Press, 2020), 147. The date of Anthony's purchase is given as approximately 1926 in Kane; earlier accounts in Rudi Stern, Let There Be Neon (Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 22, place the installation in 1923. The Kane citation, drawing on more recent archival research, is preferred here.
- Rudi Stern, Let There Be Neon, 30.
- Kane, Electrographic Architecture, 155.
- Kane, Electrographic Architecture, 155.
- Kane, Electrographic Architecture, 153
- The term "Googie" was coined by architecture critic Douglas Haskell in House and Home magazine (February 1952). See also Alan Hess, Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture (Chronicle Books, 1993).
