Jeff Giles

Before evolution hit a snag, and we reverted to slouching and staring at our phones, human beings walked with their eyes up, looking at things. In the countryside, people contemplated church steeples, maple trees, clouds. In cities, they gaped at neon — and it was everything.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, neon signs were a potent American symbol for both glamour and depravity, hope and desolation. In movies, how many star-struck ingénues have gazed up at the bright lights of Broadway? How many down-and-out characters have checked into a seedy hotel and found a malfunctioning sign buzzing like a bug-zapper outside their window?

“I love the chaotic nature of a street full of different lights,” Anna Castellani, managing partner of DeKalb Market Hall, told The Times in 2017 during a neon revival. “You feel like you’re in the city.”

Something about the audacity of that light has always seemed uniquely urban. It’s glow big or go home in the neon wilderness.

In 1898, Scottish chemist William Ramsay was collaborating with an English colleague, Morris Travers, when he discovered an inert gas, naming it “neon” after the Greek word for “new.” He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work, though it did not occur to him to use his discovery to sell theater tickets or beer. It was French inventor Georges Claude who sensed a new industry in the offing. Claude unveiled a neon light at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910, and went on to create all manner of signs for clients.

By the 1930s, New York was ablaze with color, and Times Square was an enormous flame toward which countless moths fluttered. “Visitors, too, arrive in New York to witness the nightly Vesuvius-like eruption of light,” Richard F. Shepard wrote in The Times decades later. “They may patronize the theaters, movie houses, restaurants and bars, or they may not, being content merely to walk between 42nd and 47th Streets taking in the brilliant show only a tilt of the head above them.”

Though it’s often associated with size and spectacle, neon is a craftsman’s medium: Glass tubes are warmed so that they can be shaped by glassblowers. Later, they’re filled with gas, which glows when electrified. Different gases (neon, argon, mercury, helium, etc.) produce different colors, giving sign-makers a palette to choose from.

During its heyday in New York, neon signage made people long to chew Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, to smoke Camels, to put on a tuxedo and have a cup of Maxwell House coffee poured for them by a butler who was also wearing a tuxedo. Las Vegas didn’t fully embrace neon until after World War II, but made up for lost time quickly: Nobody had to tell them not to be subtle.

Neon’s greatest selling point — that it could shout so much louder than anything else — ultimately made it seem a little desperate, a little tacky. As the 20th century rumbled on, the signs became synonymous not with the boldness and variety of cities, but with their supposed dangers and temptations. Maybe anything that wanted your attention that bad should be avoided? In the 1960s, with the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, urging “beautification” of the nation, some towns passed anti-neon ordinances. Even more damaging for neon was the fact that backlit plastic signs were being manufactured cheaply by that time.

On Jan. 4, 1966, The Times ran a sort of obituary for the neon Camel billboard that had been blowing smoke rings at Broadway and 44th Street since 1941. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,” it read. Was it really possible to mourn the passing of a cigarette ad? It was — because everything about the billboard was redolent of an era. It was a time when neon was king, a time when it apparently didn’t occur to anyone that if you were that dependent on Camels you might not be able to walk a mile. Douglas Leigh, who had designed and owned the sign, said he rented it to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. for about $10,000 a month. “It breaks my heart to lose this one,” he told The Times. “That sign was a tradition. People went out of their way to see it.”

That’s the way it was with neon. While it burned, it burned brightly.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/multimedia/neon-signs-vintage-photos.html" id="7cee6496-60d7-30ea-aaf7-079e85056ad6">The New York Times</a>.

(Past Tense)

When Neon Owned the Night

That’s partly why Fred Conrad’s picture of the sunbathers is so eerie and disquieting: We know something the sunbathers don’t. Something horrific. Something that will unmake, and remake, the world by the time they reach middle age. Conrad, a former Times staff photographer, took the shot in 1977. It must have seemed whimsical at the time — a nod to the eternal war between business and pleasure. Today, it’s surreal, almost post-apocalyptic. It looks like a poster for “Planet of the Apes.”

And that’s not just because the towers are no more. It’s also because of the beach in the picture. There was a beach in Battery Park City?

Technically, the sand wasn’t intended for public use. But Manhattan is not your usual island, and beaches are whatever Manhattanites say they are: sidewalks, tar-paper roofs, the hoods of cars or, in this case, acres and acres of landfill.

In the ’60s, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller announced plans to give the south end of Manhattan a makeover. The original proposal was so exuberant that it could only fail. The city’s design and planning commissions pushed back, to say the least. “The early drawings were appalling — it looked like they were floating Co-Op City down the Hudson,” an unnamed architect told The Times’ architecture critic Paul Goldberger in 1974. Those apartment complexes would radically alter the skyline of lower Manhattan; not surprisingly, they were arm-wrestled over for years. One serendipitous result of the construction delays was the ersatz beach.

The first wave of settlers wouldn’t arrive in Battery Park City until the early ’80s. Until then, the sandy no man’s land west of the World Trade Center was an empty stage, for which New Yorkers had no shortage of ideas. Environmental graphic designers David Vanden-Eynden and Chris Calori, seen in a Times photo by Marilynn K. Yee, liked to take the afternoon to sit in the sun. “There was nothing there yet, and there were spectacular views of the towers and across the river,” Vanden-Eynden said. He and Calori would bring along a parasol, which they’d attach to a broomstick or a tripod so they could raise it over their heads. “We used to be quite inventive in our poverty.”

Some, but not all, parts of the landfill were fenced off from the public. In 1980, the site played host to “Art on the Beach” (the word “beach” being aspirational, since the area was still known as “the Battery Park City landfill”). Sculptor Nancy Rubins, then 27 and new to the city, contributed a cave fashioned from forlorn junk like lamp shades, hoses and small appliances, which she bought in bulk from various Goodwills. “It was very humbling to work at that site,” she said recently. “I was young, and it was so huge.” She remembers how impressed she was by the landfill as a feat of engineering. Rubins’s sculpture ended up being a precursor to a transfixing, 45-foot-tall tornado of junk she built near the Watergate building in Washington, D.C.

In May 1982, conceptual artist Agnes Denes took a contrarian position on the towers and what they represented, installing one of the most iconic public art projects New York has ever seen. “Wheatfield — A Confrontation” was exactly what it sounded like: 2 acres of wheat a block from Wall Street. Denes and a team of assistants planted it over the course of a month. “I worked 16 hours a day,” she told T magazine recently. “I had no money to hire anybody to help me. I had to go home after work finished in the ‘Wheatfield’ and make sandwiches for the volunteers for the next day, because I couldn’t pay them.” Denes wanted to introduce the country’s financial power center to the actual country. Because of her, the Statue of Liberty finally got to see some amber waves of grain.

By the summer of 1983, almost 3,000 people had arrived in Battery Park City to test their mettle in a new world. (Like settlers of yore, they found tremendous natural beauty but nowhere to buy groceries.) By 2000, nearly all of the former landfill had been developed. Shortly afterward, of course, the twin towers fell, and residents were suddenly refugees.

It’s a complicated backstory for a small piece of land.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/nyregion/battery-park-city-beach.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

It's a Beach if We Say So: Lost Scenes From Downtown's Hipster Landfill

(Past Tense): NEW YORK — If you’re not prepared for it, an old photograph of the twin towers can do a number on your heart.

It's a beach if we say so: Lost scenes from downtown's hipster landfill

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Jeff Giles

Articles written by the author

When Neon Owned the Night

It's a beach if we say so: Lost scenes from downtown's hipster landfill