The Best and the Brightest

[Erik Sine]

The Best and the Brightest

David Goldman for The New York Times

The P & G sign, which was recently removed, had a circular cafe escutcheon designed by Charles Karsch.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: February 19, 2009

IN 1936, Literary Digest reported that New York was dazzled by neon signs, with 300 in Times Square alone, some larger than a boxcar. Now, in the same area, the occasional spot of neon is like a cork bobbing on a sea of big LED and back-lit plastic signs.

But a score or more of distinctive smaller signs from earlier times shine on, although their numbers are diminishing. The 1947 P & G sign at 73rd Street and Amsterdam was removed just this month.

Of a sample of a dozen notable neon signs in Manhattan, the earliest appears to be from 1933: that of Dublin House, a bar at 225 West 79th Street. Its sign was commissioned by the lessee, the Dublin-born John P. Carway, for whom E. G. Clarke Inc. designed a great two-sided sign with a green harp, and “BAR” and “TAP ROOM” flashing on and off — a masterpiece in neon.

The building it adorned, an old town house, was owned at the time as an investment by the etiquette writer Emily Post.

In 1946, Charles Karsch, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant who arrived from Russia in 1903 and had once been a sign painter, worked up an off-beat design for the White Horse Tavern, at Hudson and West 11th Streets.

The sign for Gringer home appliances, which was also designed by Mr. Karsch

Tavern is rendered in unexceptional lettering at the bottom, but White Horse appears in a sort of galloping Germanic script above, with the head of a white horse between the two. Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac, along with many other Village literary figures, passed under its rosy glow in the 1950s and 1960s.

The early 1950s Airline Diner, above the Grand Central Parkway in

Astoria, Queens, has a propeller-driven passenger airliner.

Mr. Karsch did his most ambitious known work in 1947 for the P & G Cafe. The sign, which cost $400, wrapped all the way around the store to the side street. As with earlier generations of painted signs, its message was categorical: BAR and CAFE, with a cocktail glass and, at the corner, P & G over an escutcheon made of the word cafe.

The firm Let There Be Neon restored the Russ & Daughters sign

The sign for the Russ & Daughters store, at 179 East Houston Street, was designed in 1951 by an unknown firm. Its green and red lettering is set in stainless steel channels, flanked by two multicolored fish representing the store’s wares. The store’s founder, Joel Russ, named his business to include his daughters, although his eldest was barely 4 when he started up in 1914.

Mr. Karsch also produced one of New York’s most spectacular surviving signs, in 1953, for Philip Gringer’s appliance store at 29 First Avenue and Second Street. The long band of yellow lettering at the bottom is unusual enough — yellow is uncommon in neon — but the swirly G. E. logos at either end, in icy blue, lend the sign a sort of pinball fantasy feeling.

Also impressive — and remaining — are signs like that on the early 1950s Airline Diner, above the Grand Central Parkway in Astoria, Queens, with a propeller-driven passenger airliner.

But many others have disappeared. Armando’s Restaurant, at 143 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, had a rare green-red-blue-yellow combination for its restaurant, with a lobster in yellow. Elbee Chemists, at Union Turnpike and 249th Street in Queens, had a wonderful corner wraparound, but the shop has been replaced by a pizza parlor. Those signs and others can be found on Kevin Walsh’s Web site, Forgotten-NY.com, under Ads and Signs.

At the moment, there is a chance that the P & G sign will be relocated to P & G’s new space, which the bar says will be at West 78th Street and Columbus Avenue.

In 1972, when Rudi Stern co-founded Let There Be Neon to resurrect the faltering neon craft, he told The New York Times, “The neon sign business is dying.” Today a spokesman for the firm, Jeff Friedman, says that reports of neon’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

The sign for the White Horse Tavern.

Mr. Friedman said that his firm was making more neon signs than ever. And there is plenty of neon innovation out there, like the tumbled letters of BAR that proclaim the Essex Street Alehouse on Essex near Houston Street, and the moody blue script of the Nightingale, a lounge on Second Avenue at 13th Street.

His firm restored both the Gringer and Russ & Daughters signs. Mr. Friedman says the cost of putting vintage neon to rights is not an argument against it. While an entirely new neon sign like Gringer’s would be about $20,000, he says restoring one much like it would cost about $10,000, roughly the same as an entirely new plastic one.

So the threat to vintage neon is not so much cost as eventual turnover — there aren’t that many businesses that need a leftover giant harp or cocktail glass.