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United States News

The Slow Death of Neon (curbed.com) 124

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Manhattan's iconic neon landscape is facing extinction as property owners increasingly replace historic neon signs with LED alternatives. From Times Square's dwindling glassworks to the recent losses at Smith's Bar and Subway Inn, the trend has accelerated across both small businesses and major landmarks, Curbed reports.

Rockefeller Center's proposal to replace its 1935 neon signage with LEDs marks a significant moment in this shift, highlighting tensions between energy efficiency and preserving the city's luminous cultural heritage. Of approximately 75,000 outdoor neon signs permitted between 1923-1956, only about 130 remain.
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The Slow Death of Neon More

The Slow Death of Neon

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  • Yes yes very sad. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by MrNaz ( 730548 )

    Aaaaaaanyway...

  • Power and cost drive this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bettodavis ( 1782302 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @11:55AM (#65019601)
    Neon lighting is pretty and glitzy, no doubt.

    But at like five time less power per the same lightning, LEDs beat neon in cost.

    Specially so for applications that are meant to remain turned on all night. There the electricity bills quickly add up.

    • Re: Power and cost drive this (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kackle ( 910159 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:03PM (#65019633)
      Is it more energy demanding? What I do know is that glass and some transformers are way more biodegradable than any LED and its support electronics. And isn't the eco-friendly aspect moot if the power comes from green sources?

      • Is it more energy demanding? What I do know is that glass and some transformers are way more biodegradable than any LED and its support electronics. And isn't the eco-friendly aspect moot if the power comes from green sources?

        If the neon light is red, all his honky dory, all the other colors contain mercury. And once the GLASS tube breaks, all the nasties will leech. MEanwhile, in most leds, all the nasties are captured in the crystaline silicon matrix.

        As per the Led support electronics: Habe you heard of "Ballasts". Nasty, nasty things are those.

        • Funny to see this LED vs Neon debate, parallel ICE vs EV.

          • Funny to see this LED vs Neon debate, parallel ICE vs EV.

            Serial Hybrids for the win!

          • People will simply point to the numbers and say question decided, not understanding there are intangibles that numbers don't capture but are nonetheless very subjectively important.

            • ...not understanding there are intangibles that numbers don't capture but are nonetheless very subjectively important.

              Well put...and often the case.

      • Mostly the Rockettes pedal on a long row of synchronized bikes that power the neon, in order to keep their legs fit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Doesn't glass manufacturing involve a lot of heat?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Harder to manufacture and it needs high voltage, which breaks down often and damages insulators over time in the typical setting via surface creep currents.

    • Re:Power and cost drive this (Score:5, Informative)

      by gabebear ( 251933 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:06PM (#65019645) Homepage Journal
      Neon is actually a very efficient form of lighting; converting to LED only saves ~20%. The other costs(installation/maintenance) have swung very decidedly in favor of LED as neon lost popularity.

      • Re:Power and cost drive this (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:22PM (#65019707)
        Neon bulbs generally produce ~50-60 lumens/W.
        LEDs produce 70-100 lumens/W.
        Best case, +100% efficiency.
        Worst case, +16% efficiency.
        Assuming somewhere in the middle for both, +55% efficiency.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )
          And how long does each last in a New York winter? I see LED traffic lights failing frequently when it gets below zero degrees (F).

          • Re:Power and cost drive this (Score:4, Informative)

            by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @01:19PM (#65019877)
            My outdoor LEDs have been going for 10 years now.
            While I'm not calling you a liar- there is probably some factor other than temperature at play there.
          • I haven't seen or heard about failure issues (maybe some early LEDs had issues, but more recent ones don't seem to), but one of the bigger problems was that the LEDs were too efficient and didn't give off enough heat to melt away snow that would accumulate over ver the light, making them "fail" for another reason. This isn't a major hurdle as heating can be added to the light fixtures, but it is a bit humorous that the older bulbs solved this problem through their inefficiency.
            • Ya. The claim doesn't make a lot of sense. LEDs should perform better in cold weather (higher efficiency), not die.
              Heat is what kills them. Add an ultra-powerful heat sink to them, and they should be essentially indestructible.
              As you mentioned- they're too damn efficient these days to melt snow, so that's definitely a problem. But there are better solutions to that "issue" than using shorter-life inefficient bulbs.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by narcc ( 412956 )

            Bullshit.

            You got your antique conservative talking point wrong. The actual issue with LED traffic lights in cold weather was the accumulation of snow and ice. We solved that problem long ago.

            LED lights perform very well at low temperatures. In fact, keeping them cool can extend their operational life. Incandescent lights, in contrast, become less efficient and can even take longer to reach full brightness.

            • Fluorescents really suffer in cold temperatures. I don't imagine the cold would affect incandescents that much since they get very, very hot very quickly.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by narcc ( 412956 )

                I'm not saying that the effect is enough to impede the function of the traffic light, only that it exists. My point was that LED traffic lights are fine for cold weather applications as they actually perform better than incandescent lights at low temperatures.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kackle ( 910159 )
              "I have not seen it, so it must not be true anywhere."

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )
            I live in the midwest where it gets below zero all the time and I've never seen this. May be an issue with the vendor your state/county/city went with. Also, all that commercial signage you see on store fronts and along the side of the road: Almost all of them made in the past 10 years are lit by LEDs.

          • There was a huge switch to LED traffic lights starting about 20 years ago, and you would see LED light failures quite regularly as traffic signals would look pathetic with 1/4 or more elements failing pretty quickly. It was very common.

            Either they've design changes that don't fail so obviously or they switched to some other kind of lights, because I don't see that any more. I'm guessing the LEDs are better now.

            Early CFLs that I used starting in the mid 90s were incredibly durable, but over time they got s

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kackle ( 910159 )
              Thanks for your post. It's comical that the moron, "narcc", above, would try to turn this, traffic lights(!), into some sort of a political debate. Across the street from me, a 15-year old shopping plaza now has MOST of their LED sidewalk illumination flashing (failing) in the winter weather. Lol... I'll bet those bulbs aren't $0.50 a piece...

              • I'm guessing the new traffic lights are still LEDs, but better tech, and with lenses that make them look like the old-fashioned incandescent lights. Traditionally green traffic lights are a fair bit bluer than the typical green LED light (usually around 520 nm). Honestly, I haven't taken notice if traffic lights are still the slightly warmer green color or not.

                I'm glad because the traffic lights with the very distinct individual bulbs where a bunch of them are failing are really ugly and annoying to me.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by kackle ( 910159 )
                  Heh, I can't say I've noticed bulb color spectra when it comes to passing an intersection. ;)

                  I'm very much a "if it ain't broke" person... Life is already too complex to keep reinventing wheels, in my opinion. And I don't believe the costs (energy, pollution versus plain glass/metal filaments, the required higher human skill-sets) of the traffic LED is worth the energy savings, especially as we get more and more energy from greener sources anyway. There's also the law of unintended consequences. A
      • Cost of maint? Im sure some of those neon signs that were replaced likely ran for decades if not near a century with little to no maint. Neon is already extremely energy efficient, there likely isn't a significant savings in electric between neon and LED, probably not more than the cost to make new signage / retrofit existing signage pull permits and pay the labor to install only to have LED drivers fail with bad caps in a hand full of years, and require more maint work.

        • Mostly the grass cracks, then you need someone specialized to make a new sign. Of course, an LED sign that resembles the old neon look also needs someone specialized. It's all custom.

          Some businesses just got for big LED monitors instead, more power but easier to source and it can change the display. Thus Times Square looks more like Blade Runner at times and less like 1950's Times Square.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Megane ( 129182 )
            Pretty sure modern LED wall signs are mostly made from 6-12 inch modules that are bolted and wired together, and a few control modules to run the show, often taking input from VGA or HDMI. Look up HUB75, which is apparently the most popular system. It's not custom at all.
            • HUB75 panels are pretty cheap since they are basically just a passive LED matrix with shift registers. What gets pricey about them is the controller depending on the size of display you want to run and its capabilities and inputs. Your cheapest is going to be something that just does text and some simple graphics, up to ones that can do full motion video from an analog or digital video source.

          • If the crack isn't catastrophic (the entire thing shattered), neon signs can be and are repaired, and then recharged with gas. But yes, it does take a pretty specialized person to do the work - same person that makes the signs.

    • By this standard no one should ever make a bronze statue again. Art and beauty have their own intrinsic value.
      The special aura that you get with neon and other glass tube signs is well worth the energy used, IMHO.

  • and in Boston (Score:5, Informative)

    by cellocgw ( 617879 ) <cellocgw@gCOMMAmail.com minus punct> on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @11:59AM (#65019613) Journal

    First the gorgeous animated WhiteFuel sign over Kenmore square got destroyed (and not replaced). Then the much-loved Coca-Cola sign was taken down "temporarily" during a big reconstruction thing, but some asswipe broke it into bits while in storage.
    And, yes, we have a new CITGO sign with LEDs or something, but it just plain doesn't look right.

    • And, yes, we have a new CITGO sign with LEDs or something, but it just plain doesn't look right.

      Because analog beats digital. With the previous sign there was a wonderful color curve with the neon. It wasn't just red or blue, but a multitude of colors close to, but not the same as, the main color. With LED, it's all or nothing. You get this color and that's it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sodul ( 833177 )

        There's hope though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • And, yes, we have a new CITGO sign with LEDs or something, but it just plain doesn't look right.

        Because analog beats digital. With the previous sign there was a wonderful color curve with the neon. It wasn't just red or blue, but a multitude of colors close to, but not the same as, the main color. With LED, it's all or nothing. You get this color and that's it.

        Not necesarily. You can use UV LEDs, and by carefully choosing your phospour coatings, you can have more than one wavelenght close to the desired colour.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by flink ( 18449 )

          Yes. The Christmas lights I have are LED but use white phosphor LEDs inside colored glass bulbs so you get a spectrum around the desired color and not just pure monochrome beaming into your face.

      • Well, that's not entirely true. The LEDs themselves emit a single wavelength, but they can be combined. And more importantly, LEDs are enhanced with the use of phosphors that emit other wavelengths. That's how they made white LEDs, since "white" is not a single wavelength of light.

  • The color of LEDs (Score:5, Informative)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:02PM (#65019625) Homepage Journal

    Gas tube signs have a very unique spectral emissions that makes them appear the way they do. Very little effort has been put into LED lighting to properly mimic the appealing spectral emission of incandescent filtered or gas tube colored lighting.

    Almost exclusively phosphor coatings have been tuned to cause blue and near UV leds to emit (sort of) broad spectrum white light and nothing more, though it would certainly be possible to develop a phosphor that could more closely approxmiate neon, for instance.

    As for direct emission, red green and blue LEDs are mostly now only available at certain wavelengths for tricolor mixing applications. Due to economies of scale, LEDs at other visible wavelengths are extremely underdeveloped technology.

    • Interestingly I just priced yellow and orange led lasers on Ebay and they have come down in price a lot.
    • Err - neon lights also use phosphorus coatings.
      • Quite a few colors can be made with "neon" by using different fill gases on otherwise clear tubes. But yeah a lot of colored neon is just a mercury vapor tube with a phosphor coating. Likely makes production easier since you just simply change out the tube to create a different color none of the rest of the process has to change, also pieces of different colored tubing can all be melted together to create multiple colors in the same tube using the same mercury vapor gas filling.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zarhan ( 415465 )

      Related, LED lights chains have *finally* gotten some semblance of not piercing your eyes. Technology Connections did a video on the new products on the block. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      But those single-color LEDs with very narrow band just hurt.

    • There are actually a lot of colored LEDs using phosphors now. It makes assembly cheaper, don't have to run separate production lines for each color or change over a production line to switch to another color. It also makes driving them easier since you're dealing with the same drop voltage for each color rather than varying drop voltages between red, green, blue direct color LEDs. You can identify these phosphor color LEDs because they dim after years of use. Also on things like matrix LED signage you can s
  • Fixed it! It's like the new Outlook. Newer is always better.
  • ...anyway, anyone else hoped this was about the brain rot Twitch streamer, Neon?

  • Hello darkness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ElrondHubbard ( 13672 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:16PM (#65019683)
    Soon young people will no longer understand what a neon sign looks like, much less a city filled with them. What will The Sound of Silence mean to them then? Another part of our cultural inheritance, lost...

  • As a neon install for years... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zurkeyon ( 1546501 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:18PM (#65019687)
    The things I can say about it are that A. Its VERY difficult to install vs LEDs. With up to a 10% breakage cost built into most installs. B. The transformers used to power it are thousands of watts, at high voltages, and can kill with a ingle momentary contact. C. The cost and expense of the neon itself are VASTLY more expensive than LEDs. Considering the LEDs are capable of lasting basically as long as the Neon in most cases, and are far more durable than Neon, can be made far brighter, and can be put almost anywhere neon can't, the LED is superior in every way except nostalgia. This is the times we live in. Cost vs Tradition. :-(
    • No, not thousands of Watts.

    • LED is superior in every way except nostalgia

      nostalgia, and the fact that neon is very pretty, while LED is very... bright

      • I'm already looking forward to the day we see nostalgia over the bright, eye-searing quality of LEDs when whatever comes next starts displacing them.

        • I would guess that would be laser lighting. This is starting to appear in car headlights, where they take a violet laser and aim it on a phosphor to create white light. Not really sure if there's any true advantage to "laser headlights" vs just using a violet LED aimed at the same phosphor other than marketing.

          • Where's my direct micro-fusion core lighting? Come on! We all wanna carry around micro-sized stars instead of flashlights!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        nostalgia, and the fact that neon is very pretty, while LED is very... bright

        That's a driver issue. It's trivial to control the brightness of LEDs using PWM. (Of course, it's murder on cameras, so anyone taking video of a LED sign driven with PWM gets the shimmering even though it's way faster than the eye can perceive).

        Brightness can always be reduced.

        Real neons are generally quite dim, which is why they switched to phosphor coated tubes using mercury vapor (that, and neon's deep red isn't terribly useful)

  • Not the same (Score:3)

    by ebcdic ( 39948 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:20PM (#65019691)

    LEDs don't have that sleazy downmarket vibe that neon has.

    • Re:Not the same (Score:5, Funny)

      by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:34PM (#65019739)

      LEDs don't have that sleazy downmarket vibe that neon has.

      Yea, LED doesn't set that same romantic mode as the No Tell Motel sign glowing through your room's window and softly lighting your partners face...

      • I'll give it a little more credit than that, and song writers such as Dylan painted a less seedy picture of it in his lyrics:

        They walked alone by the old canal. A little confused, I remember well, and stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright. He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train. Moving with a simple twist of fate.

        He also captured the association with New York business rather aptly in another of his songs:

        Now the bricks lay on Grand Street where the neon madmen climb. They all fall there so perfectly, it all seems so well timed. And here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice. Oh, Mama, is this really the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.

        There is something undeniably cool about neon and why we're even discussing it going away. People don't have the same response to most technologies or even notice their passing. I wouldn't be surprised to see neon signs stick around for quite awhile, even if they become more niche in their use

      • There also needs to be one letter that flickers.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          Anecdote: A strip club* near me had a neon "OPEN" sign that would occasionally flicker. Upon close inspection it became evident that they had actually built the sign to do that on purpose.

          *"50 Beautiful girls and three ugly ones"

    • The sun is a giant nuclear powered neon bulb and it is quite in the vogue these days

      • The sun is a giant nuclear powered neon bulb and it is quite in the vogue these days

        Not technically true. Photons are not created in the sun by heating neon gas. Photons are created by fusion of hydrogen into helium, etc.

        • Nope, fusion creates heat. The photons you see from the sun all are created by thermal emission at the surface.

  • Argon is next (Score:3)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:31PM (#65019725)
    Being a noble gas isn't what it once was....

    • The aristocracy is doomed and they all have to get real jobs now, except for a few that are kept in museums.

  • Opinion from a neon-maker (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hirschma ( 187820 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @01:15PM (#65019861)

    I've made two neon signs. I'm not an expert, but I did learn a lot about the craft, and how that relates to the article.

    All neon signs are made by hand. Including those "mass produced" beer signs - they might have made some kind of jig to help, but still all handmade. The process, greatly simplified, typically works like this:

    • Design is sketched, by hand, on sheets of butcher's paper,
    • Tubes are headed in different types of burners, and bent and joined according to the design and the creator's skill,
    • The design is tested in various ways,
    • The design is evacuated, with gas(es) and optionally other substances (elemental mercury, sometimes) then added back,
    • electrodes installed (involves melting and joining glass),
    • The design is then mounted on something, carefully. All that glass gets heavy, and things need to stay rigid,
    • Finally, transformers are wired, and the design is lit up.

    This is one of my two signs: https://imgur.com/a/ya5L7r2 [imgur.com]. The overall design is 4' x 4', and weights around 30-40lbs, including the plexi backing. I have no idea how I'll ever move it. It took me ~100 hours to do the entire thing (someone good could have done it in less than 20 hours). It uses, I believe, argon plus some mercury to give it a white/blue color.

    The diminishing demand for neon signage is shrinking the ecosystem. Less neon craftspeople, less sources of the tubing, vanishing materials distribution. One instructor told me that "LEDs killed my business". All of this means that getting neon made is super expensive. Simply put, there are no unskilled labor stages. There is no technical innovation. I used Inkscape for my design sketch, and all of the old hands thought it was magic.

    LEDs have many advantages. They're cheaper, the signs weigh less, they do not need rigidity, and they can be created with a lot of much cheaper labor.

    Nonetheless, you'll never get that quality of light from an LED. Neon has a quality that is impossible to duplicate - a warm, liquid quality. Subjectivity aside, neon signage retains a singular practical advantage. If you need to fix or alter a neon sign, it'll always have the same light quality if you use the same gases and other materials. Need to replace a letter from your LED sign years down the line? It isn't going to match. You'll never find the same exact LEDs ever again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      This is one of my two signs: https://imgur.com/a/ya5L7r2 [imgur.com]. The overall design is 4' x 4', and weights around 30-40lbs, including the plexi backing. I have no idea how I'll ever move it. It took me ~100 hours to do the entire thing (someone good could have done it in less than 20 hours). It uses, I believe, argon plus some mercury to give it a white/blue color.

      Ok, that thing is pretty cool, but how can you be in the same room with it without constantly going "wahwahwahwahwah pew pew pew pew?"

      • I hope that there's an old Asteroids stand-up arcade machine in my future :)

        Thanks for the compliment. I used screenshots from MAME of the sprites to ensure that my artwork was to proper scale. Sadly ran out of time to make neon "bullets". Was originally going for Space Wars ships, but they would have been pretty complex (at least, for me).

    • This is exactly it: this combination of craft, artistry and sheer human creativity is lost. Neon signs represent so much. LEDs represent a lot, too, but it's not quite the same thing when a fancy animation is programmed into a giant LED TV or even when some LED pattern is assembled by robots according to a CAD drawing made in Solidworks or Autocad or some such. Neon art represents so much planning, hard work and creativity. LEDs are just a blank page onto which any random image can be regenerated instantly.

    • Nonetheless, you'll never get that quality of light from an LED. Neon has a quality that is impossible to duplicate - a warm, liquid quality.

      Also, with leds, you can't make the light source as a free-form curve. The closest you could do is with some kind of a diffuser, or perhaps the fluorescent part of white leds.

      For example, the local streetlights here have a distinct array of leds. It makes kind of interesting patterns when tree branches happen in the way of the light, but after a while it just looks ugly and annoying.

  • ...an artform
    Hopefully, it will survive as art as its utility in commercial signage diminishes

  • I'm sure the same thing was said when Edison's inventions replaced gas lanterns with incandescent.

    And something will replace LEDs in a hundred years.

  • Las Vegas looks boring these days (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @01:34PM (#65019909) Homepage

    In the 90's Las Vegas had amazing, huge neon signs all up and down The Strip. Now there are just big LED TVs on the fronts of the big hotels. Some parts of The Strip are now barely worth looking at, as a result. To be sure, there's still a lot of unique architecture, but the neon signs are a big loss.

  • You heard 'em guys, there are a mere 130 signs out there to find and smash! ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      Neon was on the way out long before the war in Ukraine started. It was just easier and cheaper to use LED strips, so craftsmen started to retire, which meant that labor got more expensive from the fewer remaining practicing artists. Parts started getting rarer and which drove up the prices further, which drove down demand more etc. It's the same story with other niche tech like film cameras. There will always be a small dedicated group of people keeping the form alive out of love, but it will die off as

  • In 20 years, the youth of the day won't know what his song "Neon" means.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Neon:
    Is Heavy
    Buzzes constantly
    requires high voltage which can be dangerous.

    and even after a very modest lifetime, can sometimes flicker in the most annoying way.

    LEDs are WAY more energy efficient by far.

    • Three out of four are not entirely true. I agree that neon pieces can be heavy, especially with larger diameter tubing.

      My two neon pieces absolutely do not buzz at all. Properly made and powered neon is silent.

      High voltage is only present inside the tubes. The transformers are very power efficient, and draw very little power from USA mains. There is no danger at all.

      Flicker should never happen with, again, properly designed and constructed piece. In fact, mine had a bit of flicker initially (as I'm a novice

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