17-06-2025
New York's iconic neon signs are disappearing – these are the ones to see before it's too late
When I walk through the East Village after dark, down 2 nd Avenue to the corner of East 6 th Street, my heart swells. The red neon sign that spells out 'BLOCK DRUG STORES' on the Avenue, continuing with 'DRUGS COSMETICS' around the corner, has been there since the mid 1940s. It includes the detail of when the shop opened: 1885, the same year that parts of the Statue of Liberty sailed into the harbour of New York City, ready for assembly.
That sign – as grubby as it is glam – feels like a reliable friend in the neighbourhood. We all bitch about gentrification and inflation, but on this corner of town, time stands still. It's seen it all.
Take a picture if you visit that corner – it won't last forever. Many of my favourite masterpieces of typography are gone. The effervescent 1960s cursive of the Ziegfeld Theatre sign between Central Park and Times Square was kept for posterity when the cinema was repurposed as a ballroom in 2017 (141 W 54th St), but that wasn't the case with the frisky deco Subway Inn sign which glowed opposite Bloomingdales for eight decades.
Forged in the 1930s, it was a glorious beacon for daytime drinking in one of the dive's perpetually midnight pleather booths. And what is New York for, if not a 2pm martini? The bar relocated twice after its eviction in 2014 but went the way of all flesh last December. The iconic sign has now been mothballed by its owners, while the site it originally occupied was demolished and remains vacant, overgrown with weeds.
Landmark signs sometimes get a new lease of life. The Long Island City Pepsi-Cola sign was first created in 1940 for the top of the company's bottling factory. Its 1993 remake is now permanent and protected at Gantry Plaza State Park, beaming out across the East River. Less than a dozen blocks away, in Astoria, is Silvercup Studios ( 42-22 22 nd Street), where Succession, The Sopranos and 30 Rock were filmed (sadly you can't visit the sets).
The marquee branding on the scaffolding out front is pure vintage cinema, recycling letters from the old bread factory sign that was here in the 1950s. Twenty minutes by cab south, beside the Williamsburg Bridge, you'll find the brilliantly 1960s-style Domino Sugar sign which was recreated perfectly in 2022 when the old factory was turned into offices.
Lucky, but less showy architectural salvage now gets a good home. The New York Sign Museum was established near Broadway Junction in Brooklyn in 2019 by a group of archivists and artists.
For my money, it's more fun than a trip to the Met or Guggenheim, with a spooky Scooby Doo atmosphere of abandoned objects and the places they were once attached to. There are guided tours (from $28.52) of the collection on semi regular Fridays and Sundays, taking you through two floors of hand painted and steel artefacts, including signs for pianos, furs, goat meat and Jesus.
One of the signs at the Museum that resonates most with me is for Essex Cards, my local stationary shop for years, and a focal point of Avenue A life since the 1920s. The shonky lettering on the façade belongs to the streets of a 1970s Cassavetes or Scorsese movie. The shop was gutted by fire in 2022, but rose Phoenix-like thanks to a community GoFundMe. It's shiny and new, inside and out.
While you must go to the Museum to see that old sign, the stretch of the East Village on which the shop still sits is a key artery for a self-guided walking tour of downtown Manhattan graphic design history. I'd suggest you start with a tuna melt and a milk shake in the throwback 'Formica diner' that is Joe Junior (167 3 rd Avenue). Its gleefully naive signage of a cartoon burger and a character licking their lips has been there for over 50 years.
From Gramercy, head south and meander, making sure you take in the 1950s amusement arcade-style display outside Gringer & Sons Appliances (29 1 st Avenue). Although I'm no fan of the food or omnipresent queue at Katz's Deli (205 E Houston S), I hope the brick-brown 1940s signage along its side on Ludlow Street, offering 'wurst fabric' (Yiddish for sausage maker), outlives us all. When former owner Harry Tarowsky was asked by the signwriter what he wanted on one of the panels he replied 'Katz's Deli. That's all'. So, that's all it reads.
Go to see the yellow and red 1910 sign of Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery nearby, then head into the Lower East Side to buy sacks of gummy sweets at Economy Candy (107 Rivington Street), here since 1937, and to Beauty & Essex (146 Essex Street), where the current restaurant's name has been attached on to the still-visible sign for the building's previous tenants, M. Katz's Fine Furniture.
The ghost signs of the city are treasures: When absurdly spendy restaurant Carbone opened in the West Village in 2013, it attached its neon to the gorgeous old hanging sign for Rocco Restaurant, which had been there for 90 years. Also fabulous: the fancy Aesop store on the Upper West Side (219 Columbus Avenue), which hasn't changed anything about the sign for Anel French Cleaners which was here before it.
Head further down the Lower East Side, to 130 Orchard Street, to see the 1920s paint-on-brick lettering that covers two storeys of what was the fabric and interiors company S. Beckenstein, currently the Perrotin Art Gallery. The adjacent Tenement Museum offers brilliant tours of this historic neighbourhood and should be your penultimate stop before ending the day with a cocktail.
There's no shortage of gaudily emblazoned dive bars here, but I favour 169 Bar (169 East Broadway). The vibe inside is kitsch and cosy, and the retro martini glass on the sign outside is a work of art. They also serve dumplings. What more could you want?
While the best of old New York is being erased by chain stores and impossible rents, the signs are still there to enjoy. Lots of businesses, including Katz's, and the ancient gay bar Julius' (159 West 10 th Street) in the West Village, have turned their signage into a revenue stream in the form of T-shirts and other merch. Those graphics are the familiar backdrop to so much pop culture from yesteryear. The reason they're so beautiful is that they never looked new to begin with, so they'll never get old. Until, of course, they're gone.
Essentials
The Hotel Chelsea (rooms from £369) refreshed its iconic marquee and neon signage when it was turned from a notorious bohemian dive into a luxury hotel three years ago. You already know that Sid killed Nancy here, and that Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith and Warhol were all regulars, but you may not know the previous 'CHELSEA' part of the neon sign sold at auction for $46,000 (£33,800) last year (each of the letters of 'HOTEL' went for just over $3,000 each). The rooms are plush, and the bar is genteel and refined, but predictably full of fashionistas.
