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…