My first visit to the spot that would become the Neon Museum was on July 12, 2001, or so my photo archive tells me. On that day, I went to the Young Electric Sign Company’s (YESCO) “boneyard,” then a dirt-and-gravel lot, and took a few photos through the chain-link fence. I’m looking at them right now—photos of retired signs from Sassy Sally’s, the Landmark, the Sahara and others, all in various states of rust degradation and benign neglect. YESCO employees had them neatly arranged for viewing, despite the fact the boneyard wasn’t open to the public.
I said this to Neon Museum executive director Aaron Berger during a seated chat in that exact same boneyard, now home to one of the city’s premier cultural attractions. His face lit up: “Wow, I’d love to see those photos.” And a few days later, I told the same story to YESCO’s Jeff Young, now executive vice president of the family company that stored those signs in that yard to begin with. Young laughed and said, “Good thing you weren’t arrested.”
Young Electric Sign Company’s “boneyard” in 2001
Point is, I had a Neon Museum story and shared it. Over the course of our interviews, Berger and Young each told me stories of their own. Every sign you see on a tour of the Neon Museum—and the properties behind those signs, and the city that hosted those properties—has a tale worth telling. And if you’ve taken a tour of the boneyard, you know it’s the stories, above all else, that stitch together all those glass-and-metal hunks of intellectual property.
Some guests add to those stories, fleshing them out with little-known details. Berger had only been on the Neon Museum’s staff for a few months when he welcomed U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen for a visit. He offered to give her a tour of the museum, and the Nevada delegate replied: “Let me give you a tour.”
“It was this moment of, ‘Wait a minute. I am not the most knowledgeable person,’” Berger says. “Everyone has their own incredible story about Las Vegas.”
Those stories are at the heart of the reason why the Neon Museum is embarking on a phase of sweeping growth.
Last summer, the museum announced its intention to relocate from its current Las Vegas Boulevard North location to the Arts District, moving to a new home constructed by developer J Dapper. The relocation, which Berger can’t yet discuss in detail—“We’re still conducting our due diligence,” he says—will effectively triple the museum’s size, providing a much-needed increase in guest capacity: The museum had to turn away 30,000 visitors in 2023 alone.
The move will also provide indoor display and classroom space, a workshop where visitors can see neon signs being restored or made (or make one themselves), and much more space for many, many more signs: According to Berger, we’re only seeing 35% of the museum’s total collection at present.
Young says that YESCO is ready to help make more signs display-worthy, and to assist in fortifying and moving the museum’s existing signs, some of which will need to be disassembled and transported in pieces.
Liberace Museum sign
“We’re all very anxious to help how we can as we approach this massive project of moving the museum. It’s going to require everyone’s attention, not only the contractors like us, who are going to work on the science, but the other mobilization teams that will come and do their thing, the designers and architects and the general construction [crew],” Young says. “Aside from that, we’re going to need the support of the state, support of the city and the support of residents and fans all over the world, so that this museum, in its final state, serves the needs of the community the way we all hope it will.”
But that’s still a long way off, at the other end of a process of planning, contracts and construction. The first and arguably most significant thing the Neon Museum wants to expand is its thematic focus.
On December 23, the museum shared a new, more wide-ranging mission statement: “The Neon Museum illuminates the cultural essence of Las Vegas by sharing iconic signage, diverse collections, and stories that define its vibrant past, present, and future.”
“This expanded mission statement allows us to become ‘the museum of Las Vegas,’” said Berger in the December statement. “With that direction, we can enlighten more people on even more aspects of what makes this city one of the most sought-out destinations in the world.”
Cirque costumes
Proof of that new direction is coming immediately. This February, the Neon Museum teams up with Cirque du Soleil to present Stories from Backstage: Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, an interactive exhibit celebrating the entertainment company’s three decades on the Strip. The show features iconic show costumes, including Mystère’s “Red Bird” costume and the “Moonhead” piece from O, plus makeup designs, 3D-printed textiles and more.
The Neon Museum and Cirque du Soleil have had a strong relationship for a while, Berger says. In October 2023, Cirque participated in Duck Duck Shed, the museum’s annual four-day celebration of Vegas’ iconography and architecture. (A “duck” is a building whose shape tells you what it is, while a “shed” relies on signage to identify itself. The Sphere is a duck; Area15 is a shed.) Cirque invited DDS attendees backstage at O to meet its wardrobe artists, choreographers and performers, and to gain a perspective on one of their biggest productions that they couldn’t otherwise get, even from the best seats in the house.
Cirque and the Neon Museum intend to bring that experience to everyone who visits Stories from Backstage at Las Vegas City Hall’s Grand Gallery from February 10 through May 1.
“Stories from Backstage is a curated storyline that focuses on the people that make a Cirque du Soleil performance such an amazing, delightful experience,” Berger says. “It begins with the measurement of a person and how they’re outfitted into their costume, shows how they’re trained to do makeup—they do all their own makeup for each show—[and] it goes into the number of Olympic athletes that we have living in Las Vegas because of Cirque. It’s an incredible perspective. … Hopefully, after you see this show, you’re going to have a whole new appreciation for what goes into these productions.”
While the words “neon” or “sign” are absent from that description, this new emphasis on storytelling doesn’t feel too far removed from what the museum does now. Tim Burton’s 2019 Neon Museum show, Lost Vegas, was as much about his Vegas movie Mars Attacks! and the music video he made for The Killers as it was his fanciful childhood memories of a bygone Strip era. The Moulin Rouge sign, a highlight of the boneyard tour, opens up stories not just about its creator Betty Willis—who also designed the famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, as well as Downtown’s Blue Angel—but about racist segregation in Vegas, and the role that integrated casino played in ending it.
And the sign that’s arguably become the visual centerpiece of the collection, the 80-foot-tall guitar-shaped sign that fronted the former Hard Rock Cafe location on Paradise, affords the museum guides several storytelling avenues from which to choose. They can talk about the guitar that inspired it, a Gibson Les Paul Deluxe owned by Pete Townshend; they can talk about the legacy of the Hard Rock brand, soon to grace a fourth Vegas property; or they could talk about the sign itself, as Jeff Young does when he relates a conversation he had with Warwick Stone, the Hard Rock’s design guru and caretaker of its priceless memorabilia collection.
“He brings [Townshend’s] guitar over to YESCO and says, ‘Hey, what do you think?’ We’re like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ We’re used to saying, ‘Sure, we’ll build it.’ And our people really got excited about it.
“He said, ‘I doubled my budget; got 70 grand.’ So, we’re like, ‘Okay, good, good, good.’ We came back with our proposal, which was almost $300,000. And he said, ‘Gosh, what are you doing to me? Whoa, talk about killing the deal.’And we said, ‘Oh, don’t worry. We’ll lease it to you.’”
Archival photos of YESCO’s early years
That’s another big part of the reason why YESCO and the Neon Museum have such a cozy relationship, and why the museum will continue to receive new signs well into the future. YESCO created the boneyard because they “didn’t have the heart to throw this stuff away,” Young says. (There are signs in the museum’s collection, many of them, that were made by Young’s father and grandfather.) And the company’s current arrangement with many Vegas properties bearing their handiwork is like the one they had with Hard Rock: YESCO pays for construction of the sign, leases them to the property, and reclaims them when the property no longer wants it, or no longer exists. One restoration fundraiser later, the Neon Museum has a new attraction and a new set of stories.
One such storyteller has arrived the week Berger and I have our interview: The five-foot-tall “LVIII” sign that stood on the corner of Fourth and Fremont Streets during the week of Super Bowl 58. “This will enable us to collect and tell stories about the Raiders, about the Golden Knights, the Aces, the Rebels—the entire history of sports in Las Vegas,” Berger says.
He adds that if anyone would like to add to the museum’s storytelling base, there’s a booth inside the museum’s Paul Revere Williams-designed lobby building where visitors can do just that. Nicknamed RACHEL—short for “Record And Collect Historical Experiences in Las Vegas”—Berger describes the booth almost as he would a confessional, but with a verbal wink.
“It can be as salacious as you want,” he says. “We have some fantastic stories. We were able to put RACHEL inside the Tropicana for the last 10 days of operation, and we captured 90 stories in those 10 days. For museums to do an oral history, to do 90 oral histories, you’re looking at 40 years, because it’s so expensive and it takes so much time. With RACHEL, we’re able to really capture a great cross section of people, which we’re really excited about.”
He’s also excited for the next Duck Duck Shed event, which happens April 24-27, and for the next two signs funded through the museum’s sign restoration program, the Dunes and Binion’s Horseshoe. (The Frontier, the Green Shack and Wee Kirk o’ the Heather chapel still need restoration funds; visit neonmuseum.org/neon-sign-restoration-program for details.)
Berger is especially sensitive to the plight of retired neon signs as they’re replaced by newer, more energy-efficient and arguably more versatile LED signage, from Vegas to New York’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself: without LED, “the Sphere would never have happened,” as Young points out.
But Berger stresses that the Neon Museum will always put its namesake element at the center of everything it does. Every story it tells will begin with a soft-glowing light turning on.
“We will always maintain the sign collection. We’ll continue to grow that sign collection,” Berger says. “But we also want to look at other collections from historic properties that are out there, whether they’re menus and placemats and things like that, or costumes [from] stage residencies. That change is what is allowing us to do the Cirque du Soleil exhibition.
“I like to think about it this way. In the 1950s, you’re driving through the desert, and you see your first neon sign at night across this desert sky. It’s so, so dark, and you see this orange glow off in the distance. Well, that was a beacon, right? That was something to tell you that this is a place to rest, a place to eat, a place to have fun, a place to spend the night. You knew that there was something up ahead, because there was a beacon in the horizon. I think the Neon Museum is also that beacon, and our job is to make sure that we’re providing that light and that ongoing feeling of the respite that you’ve been looking for.”
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