Travel

Bathe in the Glow of Las Vegas' Past at the Neon Museum

In a city that likes to blow up its history, the museum preserves its most brilliant parts.

Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum

Betty Willis should’ve gone for the cash. In 1959, the pioneering female commercial artist designed what is probably the most famous-and one of the longest lasting-neon symbols in the world. In 1952 she was employed by Western Neon Sign Company when a salesman named Todd Rogich, seeing welcome signs proliferate in other locales, approached her about designing a fitting emblem for the city. He suggested Las Vegas’ reflect its flashy veneer by utilizing one of its most recognizable, and somehow still novel, features: neon.

Willis’s 25-foot Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign sits on the southern tip of the Strip-technically in unincorporated Clark County-flanked by palm trees and Elvis impersonators, roadside Americana beckoning to motorists with its promise of possibility. Balancing on two poles, an exaggerated Googie-style diamond is bordered with flashing incandescent bulbs.

Red letters spell out “WELCOME” against silver dollar coins rimmed in white neon, a nod to both the Silver State and the gamblers attracted to it. And on the top sits a red metal starburst outlined in brilliant yellow. Willis told the New York Times before her death in 2018, “I added a Disney star for happiness.” In 2008 the city constructed a parking lot for the sole purpose of encouraging pedestrians to line up for a perfect (and free) photo op. The sign cemented Willis’s legacy, thanks to its alluring neon.

Flickr/NESR
Flickr/NESR
Flickr/NESR

Neon captivated from its very inception. In 1898, British scientists William Ramsay and his assistant Morris Travers discovered the new element, which emitted a magical crimson glow when electrically stimulated. To say they were in awe of the element’s power would be an understatement: of the discovery Travers wrote, “the blaze of crimson light from the tube told its own story and was a sight to dwell upon and never forget.”

The first neon signs were unveiled in Paris in 1910, and it didn’t take long for the illuminated phenomena to make its way to the States, rising in tandem with the country’s romance with automobiles. It’s said the United States’ first neon sign was erected in 1923. It sat atop a hotel reading “Packard” in four-foot-high red and blue lettering, and drew onlookers from far and wide, creating traffic jams with its eminence.

Caron Badkin/Shutterstock
Caron Badkin/Shutterstock
Caron Badkin/Shutterstock

But it was Vegas that fully understood-and utilised-neon’s true potential. In the early 1930s, after the legalization of gambling brought an influx of tourists and the construction of the Hoover Dam an abundance of electricity, Las Vegas transformed from a sleepy frontier town to one dripping with gaseous, colourful glitz. The downtown thoroughfare of Fremont Street earned the nickname of Glitter Gulch in the 1940s, with everything from pharmacies to casinos lit up in lights.

Rogich eventually sold the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign to Clark County officials for $4,000, and as the story goes, Willis declined to copyright the design, saying it was her gift to her beloved city. But she failed to remember that her city was built on capitalism-and opportunity. Years later, after seeing the sign replicated everywhere from snow globes to boxer shorts to potato chips, she acknowledged, “I should make a buck out of it. Everybody else is.”Today, you can see the Willis’s sign whenever the mood strikes. In 2013, solar panels were attached, ensuring the symbol’s longevity and making it much more energy-efficient (not quite in line with the rest of Vegas, but a hope for the future). Listed in the State Register of Historic Places, it’s an unusually enduring marquee in a city whose M.O. is to repeatedly pave over its past.

Many of Vegas’ other once-iconic neon signs are forever gone, smashed into shimmering shards and committed only to memories of the city’s mid-century opulence. But if catching sight of Willis’ glowing contribution sparks an interest in the element’s glowing reaches, you can always get your fix at the Neon Museum.

artemu kopylovk/Shutterstock
artemu kopylovk/Shutterstock
artemu kopylovk/Shutterstock

A ticket to an illuminating history

In the early 1990s, Las Vegas began making room for new hotels the best way they knew how: by imploding the old ones in splashy, theatrical affairs. Sometimes they had accompanying fireworks, one time they had pirates. The Dunes was the first to meet this fate back in 1993 (making way for the Bellagio), followed by the Landmark in 1995, a space needle-like structure whose crumbling implosion was captured in the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks. Then, like dominoes, the Sands was eliminated in November of 1996, and the Hacienda went a month later. The latter’s booming demise was showcased as part of a televised New Year’s Eve extravaganza that year.

In 2007 came two more major demolitions: New Frontier, a western-themed Howard Hughes joint where both Sigfried & Roy and Elvis made their Vegas debuts. And the Stardust Casino, inspired by a mid-century affinity for space exploration, frequented by the likes of Sinatra, and once the domain of kingpin and bookie Lefty Rosenthal, AKA the inspiration behind the Hollywood blockbuster Casino.

Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock
Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock
Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock

The artists who laboured over the neon signage marking these disappearing artifacts despaired before resolving to save their works. Rescuing the jagged and otherworldly-not to mention massive-Stardust sign was an especially significant feat: The letters range from 14 to 18 feet in height and contain over 1,100 light bulbs, 975 in the S alone. Imposing in stature, it probably can’t be seen from space, but it sure gives the impression it could.

Today, however, it can be seen in the Neon Museum. Established in 1996 as a nonprofit to collect, preserve, and exhibit discarded neon signs, the museum began with a donation by the Young Electric Sign Company and was initially only let in visitors by appointment. In 2012, the campus’ “boneyard”-the space where items no longer in use are stored-opened to the public.

Approximately 250 signs populate the museum, some dating back to the 1930s, a number always growing as more are donated (the only way they acquire signs). Around two dozen of those are electrified, providing viewers with a dazzling taste of old Las Vegas. And in true Vegas fashion, you can even have your wedding there.

Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum

Like much of Las Vegas, the open-air (or closed, when it’s raining) Neon Museum is best experienced in full illumination after the sun goes down. But swinging by in the daytime-even if it’s closed-can still prove fruitful. There’s a mural on the outer wall of the North gallery painted with the greatly influential yet not-so-well-known figures that shaped Las Vegas history, including, of course, welcome sign mastermind Betty Willis.

And things get especially interesting if you’re an architecture buff. The striking shell-shaped entrance that serves as the museum’s Visitors Center once belonged to the La Concha Motel, which operated on the Strip from 1961 to 2004 and was famously patronized by slick celebrities and Hollywood types. But, more importantly, it was designed by trailblazing African American architect Paul Revere Williams, who, in 1923, became the first Black architect to join the American Institute of Architects. The prolific pioneer designed upwards of 2500 buildings, including works for Lucy and Desi Arnaz and Carey Grant. (In a tragic, infuriating, sad, and loathsome twist, he’s also known for teaching himself to draw upside down so white clients wouldn’t be uncomfortable sitting next to him.)

Most of Williams’ creations were in his hometown of Los Angeles, but there are others scattered around the country. Like the St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, which he designed for free, and the La Concha, whose lobby was saved from demolition in 2005 and relocated to the Neon Museum shortly thereafter.

Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum

Arrive at the museum at nightfall and the La Concha shells buzz, getting lit alongside its neon buddies. But before you anywhere near the museum’s entrance, you’ll spot one of its most recent-and most gigantic-acquisitions: the 82-foot-tall Hard Rock Café guitar shooting straight up from the boneyard, a celestial instrument seemingly floating in mid-air.

The first of its kind, the hulking instrument spent 1990 to 2017 on the corner of Paradise Road and Harmon Avenue in Vegas, and even made it to the silver screen with appearances in classics like Honey I Shrunk the Kids and National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation. With 1,530 incandescent bulbs and around 4,110 feet of neon tubing, it took 1,650 hours and $250,000 in crowdsourced funds to restore. (All that, and it can’t even play a tune.)

Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum

Enthusiastic museum guides offer tours, detailing backgrounds stagnant plaques could never deliver. Each turn captures a specific time and place in Las Vegas’ complicated and storied history.

Take another of Betty Willis’s works: the Moulin Rouge sign, propped up near the entrance and spelled out in swooping pink cursive. Named after the Parisian club, it marked the first desegregated hotel casino in town. It hit the Strip in 1955, and while its tenure only lasted a brief six months, its impact can still be felt today.

The Moulin Rouge relic is a stone’s throw from Binion’s Horseshoe. Owned by career gambler and racketeer Benny Binion, the property was Glitter Gulch personified. Boasting a personal history as scandal-prone as his industry, Binion was known for both a murder conviction and, on a lighter note, initiating the custom that players drink for free. (Thanks, Benny.)

Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum
Flickr/The Neon Museum

A little further down, visitors will stumble upon the sign for the Sahara Hotel, famous for once hosting the Beatles overnight (the band was originally scheduled to play a show there, too, but it had to be moved when checking into the hotel spurred such a commotion). Elsewhere, there are examples of the first moving signs alongside non-neon attractions like a gigantic skull salvaged from Treasure Island, staring up into the night sky.

Across the way, the North Gallery houses Brilliant!, an audiovisual presentation that begins with a demonstration of how neon works by agitating gas in a tube before reanimating 40 different signs using projection mapping. There are three shows every evening.

And if you feel like going all out, you can even make a neon night of it by booking a helicopter tour package. The choppers first swoop you over the current-day Strip, before depositing you at the Neon Museum, juxtaposing the present day with where it all began.

Steve Cukrov/Shutterstock
Steve Cukrov/Shutterstock
Steve Cukrov/Shutterstock

To forecast Vegas’ future, just look to its past

Downtown is a fitting home for the Neon Museum: While the Strip reinvents itself every other day, Vegas’ less-touristy area strives to look to the future while preserving the past. Here, you can still get a sense of what drove people to forge this thriving, anything-goes town in the middle of the Mojave Desert. In 1905, the city was born by auction, and Fremont Street became its glittery nexus. Today, the attraction stands as the covered Fremont Street Experience, complete with a nightly light show and the SlotZilla zipline zooming past retro landmarks like the Golden Gate Hotel Casino, opened in 1906, 1946’s Golden Nugget, and the Four Queens, dating to 1966.

In the Four Queens, you’ll find Hugo’s Cellar, opened in 1973 and known for one of the best throwback steakhouse deals in town. Expect tuxedo-clad waiters and a tableside salad cart and, if you’re a lady, they’ll greet you with a (surprisingly long-lasting) rose.

Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

The El Cortez Hotel, once owned by notorious gangster Bugsy Siegel, still looks much like it did when it opened in 1941 as downtown’s first major casino resort. Read up on this property as well as the rest of the city’s underworld past in the nearby Mob Museum, an almost immersive experience, as it’s housed in the former courthouse where the infamous Kefauver trials were held in the early 1950s. It was there that the sordid bond between casino owners and organized crime bosses came to light.

Downtown also strives to revitalize its landscape with spots like the D Hotel, opened in 2012 and incorporating vintage touches like flair bartenders and old-school slot machines in its second-floor casino. The Lip Smacking Foodie Tour gives a good overview of the changes, merging the area’s history with its modern progress by taking you past new murals and into contemporary restaurants like Carson Kitchen, founded by celebrity chef Kerry Simon, and Container Park, where a sea of shipping containers have been turned into bustling food stands.

Kit Leong/Shutterstock
Kit Leong/Shutterstock
Kit Leong/Shutterstock

Look at any old picture of Fremont Street and you’ll spot a 40-foot-tall neon cowboy in front of the Pioneer Club, seemingly pointing at himself. That’s Vegas Vic, erected in 1951. At one point, he waved and exclaimed “Howdy, Partner!” every 15 minutes. He’s still there, though his voice box has since been silenced.

But if you’re looking for Vegas Vic’s long-lost girlfriend Vegas Vickie-onetime fixture of the Glitter Gulch-you’ll find her fully restored and kicking up her heels at the new Circa Resort & Casino right on the Fremont Street Experience, where she has her own cocktail lounge. Opened in 2020, Circa is a destination in itself, with its three-story Sportsbook (the largest in the world) and Stadium Swim-a pretty ingenious setup where you can splash around in six pools on three different levels while watching multiple sports on soaring television screens.

Circa just so happens to occupy the same location as the Northern Club, the first casino in Nevada to get a gambling license. These days, the venture is hoping to do the same thing for Downtown that the Northern Club did for, well, the entire world: Light it up like never before.

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Vanita Salisbury is Thrillist’s Senior Travel Writer. She has always wanted her name in neon lights.

Travel

Ditch your Phone for ‘Dome Life’ in this Pastoral Paradise Outside Port Macquarie 

A responsible, sustainable travel choice for escaping big city life for a few days.

nature domes port macquarie
Photo: Nature Domes

The urge to get as far away as possible from the incessant noise and pressures of ‘big city life’ has witnessed increasingly more of us turn to off-grid adventures for our holidays: Booking.com polled travellers at the start of 2023 and 55% of us wanted to spend our holidays ‘off-grid’.  Achieving total disconnection from the unyielding demands of our digitised lives via some kind of off-grid nature time—soft or adventurous—is positioned not only as a holiday but, indeed, a necessity for our mental health. 

Tom’s Creek Nature Domes, an accommodation collection of geodesic domes dotted across a lush rural property in Greater Port Macquarie (a few hours’ drive from Sydney, NSW), offers a travel experience that is truly ‘off-grid’. In the figurative ‘wellness travel’ sense of the word, and literally, they run on their own independent power supply—bolstered by solar—and rely not on the town grid. 

Ten minutes before you arrive at the gates for a stay at Tom’s Creek Nature Domes, your phone goes into ‘SOS ONLY’. Apple Maps gives up, and you’re pushed out of your comfort zone, driving down unsealed roads in the dark, dodging dozens of dozing cows. Then, you must ditch your car altogether and hoist yourself into an open-air, all-terrain 4WD with gargantuan wheels. It’s great fun being driven through muddy gullies in this buggy; you feel like Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.  As your buggy pulls in front of your personal Nature Dome, it’s not far off that “Welcome…to Jurassic Park” jaw-dropping moment—your futuristic-looking home is completely engulfed by thriving native bushland; beyond the outdoor campfire lie expansive hills and valleys of green farmland, dotted with sheep and trees. You’re almost waiting to see a roaming brachiosaurus glide past, munching on a towering gum tree…instead, a few inquisitive llamas trot past your Dome to check out their new visitor. 

To fully capture the awe of inhabiting a geodesic dome for a few days, a little history of these futuristic-looking spherical structures helps. Consisting of interlocking triangular skeletal struts supported by (often transparent) light walls, geodesic domes were developed in the 20th century by American engineer and architect R. Buckminster Fuller, and were used for arenas. Smaller incarnations have evolved into a ‘future-proof’ form of modern housing: domes are able to withstand harsh elements due to the stability provided by the durable materials of their construction and their large surface area to volume ratio (which helps minimize wind impact and prevents the structure from collapsing). As housing, they’re also hugely energy efficient – their curved shape helps to conserve heat and reduce energy costs, making them less susceptible to temperature changes outside. The ample light let in by their panels further reduces the need for artificial power. 

Due to their low environmental impact, they’re an ideal sustainable travel choice. Of course, Tom’s Creek Nature Domes’ owner-operators, Cardia and Lee Forsyth, know all this, which is why they have set up their one-of-a-kind Nature Domes experience for the modern traveller. It’s also no surprise to learn that owner Lee is an electrical engineer—experienced in renewable energy—and that he designed the whole set-up. As well as the off-grid power supply, rainwater tanks are used, and the outdoor hot tub is heated by a wood fire—your campfire heats up your tub water via a large metal coil. Like most places in regional Australia, the nights get cold – but rather than blast a heater, the Domes provide you with hot water bottles, warm blankets, lush robes and heavy curtains to ward off the chill.

nature domes port macquarie
Photo: Nature Domes

You’ll need to be self-sufficient during your stay at the Domes, bringing your own food. Support local businesses and stock up in the town of Wauchope on your drive-in (and grab some pastries and coffee at Baked Culture while you’re at it). There’s a stovetop, fridge (stocked as per a mini bar), BBQs, lanterns and mozzie coils, and you can even order DIY S’More packs for fireside fun. The interiors of the Domes have a cosy, stylish fit-out, with a modern bathroom (and a proper flushing toilet—none of that drop bush toilet stuff). As there’s no mobile reception, pack a good book or make the most of treasures that lie waiting to be discovered at every turn: a bed chest full of board games, a cupboard crammed with retro DVDs, a stargazing telescope (the skies are ablaze come night time). Many of these activities are ideal for couples, but there’s plenty on offer for solo travellers, such as yoga mats, locally-made face masks and bath bombs for hot tub soaks. 

It’s these thoughtful human touches that reinforce the benefit of making a responsible travel choice by booking local and giving your money to a tourism operator in the Greater Port Macquarie Region, such as Tom’s Creek Nature Domes. The owners are still working on the property following the setbacks of COVID-19, and flooding in the region —a new series of Domes designed with families and groups in mind is under construction, along with an open-air, barn-style dining hall and garden stage. Once ready, the venue will be ideal for wedding celebrations, with wedding parties able to book out the property. They’ve already got one couple—who honeymooned at the Domes—ready and waiting. Just need to train up the llamas for ring-bearer duties! 

An abundance of favourite moments come to mind from my two-night stay at Tom’s Creek: sipping champagne and gourmet picnicking at the top of a hill on a giant swing under a tree, with a bird’s eye view of the entire property (the ‘Mountain Top picnic’ is a must-do activity add on during your stay), lying on a deckchair at night wrapped in a blanket gazing up at starry constellations and eating hot melted marshmallows, to revelling in the joys of travellers before me, scrawled on notes in a jar of wishes left by the telescope (you’re encouraged to write your own to add to the jar). But I’ll leave you with a gratitude journal entry I made while staying there. I will preface this by saying that I don’t actually keep a gratitude journal, but Tom’s Creek Nature Domes is just the kind of place that makes you want to start one. And so, waking up on my second morning at Tom’s —lacking any 4G bars to facilitate my bad habit of a morning Instagram scroll—I finally opened up a notebook and made my first journal entry:

‘I am grateful to wake up after a deep sleep and breathe in the biggest breaths of this clean air, purified by nature and scented with eucalyptus and rain. I am grateful for this steaming hot coffee brewed on a fire. I feel accomplished at having made myself. I am grateful for the skittish sheep that made me laugh as I enjoyed a long nature walk at dawn and the animated billy goats and friendly llamas overlooking my shoulder as I write this: agreeable company for any solo traveller. I’m grateful for total peace, absolute stillness.” 

Off-grid holiday status: unlocked.

Where: Tom’s Creek Nature Domes, Port Macquarie, 2001 Toms Creek Rd
Price: $450 per night, book at the Natura Domes website.

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