Inside the restoration of Havana’s 20th-century neon signs

[Ken Gargett]

thought this might be of interest to some. 

 

Let there be light
Inside the restoration of Havana’s 20th-century neon signs

After the Cuban revolution, much of the signage was destroyed or fell into disrepair. One artist has made it luminous again

Books, arts and culture
Prospero

---

Jan 13th 2020

BY I.S. | HAVANA

IN THE 1950s Havana glowed with colour. Its hotels and bars, casinos and cabarets—many of them owned by American mobsters—catered to the world’s rich and famous. More than 140 cinemas bore incandescent signs, each one measuring up to ten metres across. Shops shone with swirling bands of light, advertising luxury foreign brands.

Then came the revolution. When Fidel Castro’s communist insurgents reached Havana in late 1958, they shut down the casinos, expropriated the hotels and restaurants and fired bullets at the signage. “When the rebels got to the city there was no final battle. There was no enemy to face or to deal with, other than the reminders of the capitalist element displayed in the city,” says Kadir López, a Cuban artist.

The outlook of the new government, coupled with the American embargo and the ensuing economic hardship, led to the closure of many of Havana’s entertainment venues, including all but a dozen of its cinemas, says Mr López. The city’s neon signs were left to fall into disrepair; for decades, the streets went dark.

Now the lights have started to come back on. Mr López has spent seven years restoring the city’s vintage signs. He uses old photographs to get a sense of the signs’ original appearance, before creating new glass tubing and filling it with luminous gas. It is a laborious process—each artefact takes two to three weeks to restore—but once finished, many are reinstalled at their previous sites.

Mr López initially funded the project himself, turning his back garden into a workshop, but as awareness of his efforts has grown he has begun to receive commissions. The famous Tropicana nightclub, once frequented by celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart, asked Mr López to restore or recreate all of its neon displays, a process that has taken several months. He also creates new custom signs for local businesses, using the profits to fund the restorations.

Signs rescued from dilapidated buildings, as well as some of cultural significance, are now on display at the Rex Neon Museum, which began opening daily to the public on January 8th. The museum aims to shed light on Cuba’s past through its neon signs. As well as the restored works, Mr López has also contributed several new pieces illustrating the country’s history, including a neon reproduction of doodles drawn by President John F. Kennedy during a meeting in the Oval Office in 1962 (he was contemplating a naval blockade in Cuba).

Located on San Rafael Boulevard, a busy pedestrian street in the centre of Havana, the museum is housed in an art deco building that opened in 1939 and became Latin America’s first multiplex cinema. When Mr López was granted permission to use it, thanks to a government-run arts scheme, the cinema had been abandoned since 1980 and was flooded with sewage and several decades’ worth of discarded detritus; one of the two screening rooms was missing its roof. That space has been transformed into an open-air exhibition area and concert venue, filled with vintage metal cinema seats. The other room will be used as a workshop for the hundreds of signs still awaiting restoration. Upstairs, the old projection booths have been turned into a small gallery space to exhibit works by local artists. There are two bars, one of which is designed to evoke the Prohibition era, when rum-runners smuggled liquor from the Caribbean into the United States. Mr López hopes that the museum will encourage art students to learn to work with neon, a skill few in Cuba retain.

Yet the most rewarding aspect of his work, he says, has been witnessing its social impact. Havana’s street lights are sparse and poorly maintained, so the signs are changing the way that residents interact with the city. Places that once hosted illegal activity (particularly drug dealing or prostitution) are transformed by the introduction of light, Mr López says; now locals gather under the signs to talk and play games. “It was a really clean solution to a lot of troubles,” he says. “With one single neon light on one block, you can get the whole area to really pop up.” Many of the city’s older residents, who remember life before the revolution, applauded when the signs were switched on. Some even wept.

[Ken Gargett]

sadly the machine dumped the photos. 

[Fuzz]

Got you covered, Ken.

Other threads re Cuba's neon signs.

 

 

 

[Ken Gargett]

11 minutes ago, Fuzz said:

Got you covered, Ken.

Other threads re Cuba's neon signs.

 

 

 

ta Fuzz.