New York neon nights
The city lit by "liquid fire"
Chris Wild
1940s-1950s
New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars - THOMAS WOLFE, "THE WEB AND THE ROCK", 1939
It was for photographs of New York, such as these taken for LIFE magazine, that Andreas Feininger (1906-1999) attained fame. A trained architect, Feininger turned to photography at age 30. In 1939, he emigrated from Europe to New York, where he made photography his career.Just three decades earlier, a large-scale neon light was switched on in front of the public for the very first time when Georges Claude — aka "the Edison of France" — demonstrated his invention at the Paris Motor show in December 1910. Claude's company was creating huge amounts of neon as a waste product of its core business, liquefying air, and it was this supply of neon that kicked off the age of the neon sign. With his patents, Claude had a monopoly on neon sign production.The neon signs might have been made purely for advertising. A variety of colors could be made to light tubes that were bent into any and every shape, including letters and numbers. In 1913, three years after the Motor Show a huge Cinzano sign was on display in Paris, and in 1923, Claude sold two neon signs to an LA car dealership — the first American neon signs. (They said "Packard.")Licensing smaller manufacturers to create neon signs in specific geographic territories, Claude's neon sign company took a percentage of the entire business, valued at $16.9 million by 1931. A year later, his patent expired. By 1940, almost 2,000 small workshops were crafting neon signs in the U.S. Douglas Leigh, the architect of the world-famous Times Square displays, went far beyond neon, incorporating animation, sound, fog and smells. A steaming coffee pot, a Camel cigarette sign that blew smoke rings and a blinking penguin were some of his most memorable creations.
WWII saw a decrease in the numbers of signs produced, and New York's lights were dimmed to save fuel. But, after the war, New York's Egani Institute received government funding to give ex-soldiers specialist training in the manufacture of neon signs.
Much of the visual excitement of Times Square was Leigh's genius as a kinetic and luminal artist - Rudi Stern, "The New Let There Be Neon", 1988
Such signs! They tower. They revolve, they oscillate, they soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless. - Tom Wolfe on neon signs, 1965
